And now, an RTI query on JNU poster

FACT CHECK Activist takes ‘country without post office’ title too seriously

When I saw the JNU poster on the Internet, I wondered if the protesting students were trying to misguide others into believing that Kashmir was backward enough to not have a single post office.

SRINAGAR: When posters for a February 9 event, titled ‘Poetry reading - The country without a post office’, were pasted across the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus earlier this month, it quickly snowballed into a nationwide controversy.

However, in the midst of the controversy, an engineer from Hyderabad’s Miyapur area found himself asking a completely different question. Is it true that Kashmir does not have a single post office, he wanted to know.

Now, the man in question – Kanumuri Manikanta Karthik – also happened to be a prolific RTI activist. So he lost no time in filing an application, a copy of which is with HT, to make the following enquiries: “First, what percentage of Kashmir is covered by the postal department? Second, how many post offices are there in Kashmir? Third, what should be the number of post offices in Kashmir, according to postal department norms? And fourth, if there is difference between the numbers of post offices established, what is the reason for the difference and what steps are being taken to cover it?”

However, if Karthik had run a quick Google search, he would have realised that the title of the event actually referred to a poem penned by renowned Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali. The work pertained to a certain period of time in 1990, when militancy and counter-insurgency operations had peaked in the Valley, resulting in the disruption of postal operations across the region.

Unfortunately, Karthik knew nothing of this. “When I saw the JNU poster on the Internet, I wondered if the protesting students were trying to misguide others into believing that Kashmir was backward enough to not have a single post office. So I filed an online RTI,” the engineer told HT over the phone from Hyderabad.

He received a prompt response from the office of the chief postmaster general, Srinagar. Replying to the first two questions, JR Angural, assistant director of postal services, J-K Circle, said: “Postal facilities are provided in every nook and corner of Kashmir Valley… A total of 1,699 post offices function in the J-K Circle, of which 705 post offices function in Kashmir Valley.” As there was no data available for his third and fourth questions, Karthik had to make do with an inconclusive “no comments”.

However, despite having all his doubts on Kashmir’s postal system cleared, Karthik isn’t a very happy man. For one, he is being trolled mercilessly on social media.

“Someone filed an RTI to disprove Agha Shahid’s famous poem. No hope,” tweeted Londonbased Kashmiri novelist Mirza Waheed along with a screenshot of Karthik’s RTI response.

KANUMURI MANIKANTA KARTHIK, RTI activist