U.S. senator, activist are barred from Kashmir
NEW DELHI — A U.S. senator and a well-known Indian activist were barred from visiting Indian-administered Kashmir, the disputed Himalayan territory where at least 10 people were injured Saturday in a grenade blast as a government security and communications lockdown entered a third month.
Director General of Police Dilbagh Singh said the blast was caused by a “militant attack” and occurred near the office of a civil administrator in the southern town of Anantnag.
He said that the injured included a police official and a journalist, and that all of the injuries were minor.
“It was a militant attack,” he said without elaborating. “Police are probing to identify and nab the culprit.”
No other details were immediately available.
Since removing several constitutional provisions that gave the state of Jammu and Kashmir semi-autonomy in August, Indian authorities have flooded the Kashmir Valley, the heart of a decades-old armed insurgency against Indian rule, with thousands of additional troops.
Mobile, Internet and phone services have been severed, and landline phone access remains spotty, disrupting daily life and business in the valley, home to about 7 million people. More than 2,000 people, including mainstream political leaders, are in jails around India or under house arrest.
Ram Madhav, a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling Hindu nationalist party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said leaders under house arrest in Kashmir would be released soon, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.
“Prevention detention in five-star hotels with good facilities with TVs and books and all those things is a temporary measure to ensure law and order in the state,” the news agency quoted Madhav as saying.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., part of a U.S. congressional delegation visiting India on trade and other issues, said Friday in New Delhi that the Indian government had denied his request to travel to Kashmir.
Van Hollen said Washington was “closely monitoring the humanitarian situation” in Kashmir. The House Foreign Affairs Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on human rights in South Asia later this month, and Kashmir is expected to be a focus.
Sandeep Pandey, a wellknown activist and education reformer, said he and other activists were barred from leaving the airport in Srinagar, the region’s main city, where they had traveled Friday for an informal fact-finding mission.
“We were held up and we don’t know what it was done,” Pandey said Saturday in New Delhi.
The district magistrate restricted him from traveling beyond the arrivals lounge, citing a law that limits public gatherings, according to a copy of the order.
The 54-year-old intended “to organize protests” against the constitutional changes in Kashmir, according to the order, a claim Pandey denied.
No foreign journalists have received permission from the Indian government to report in Kashmir since Aug. 5, although Indian citizens who work for foreign news organizations have been able to report from the region.