In our Kashmir coverage, HuffPost India focused on how the nearly month long communication blackout has disrupted people’s lives in every imaginable way, even ruining Eid.
On 7 August, Safwat Zargar filed this report on the first civilian casualty after Article 370 was nullified. Osaib Altaf, a 17-year-old, drowned in a river as he tried to escape CRPF personnel during a curfew.
Piyasree Dasgupta spotted a wave of misogyny on the social media platform, Tik Tok, with men posting lewd video fantasies of “getting” women from Kashmir.
Upon returning from a fact-finding mission from J&K, Kavita Krishnan, the secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association, told us that the security forces were carrying out raids and picking up young men, even children, across villages.
Kashmiri political activist Shehla Rashid spoke to us about why she felt compelled to tweet out unverified allegations of torture against the Indian army, which triggered calls for her to be arrested. “If the media was allowed to function, if social media was allowed to function, I would not have to do this,” she said. “I really do think the world needs to hear all this…”
Former J&K Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti’s daughter, Iltija Mufti, spoke to us about her 16 days under house arrest. “I feel like our lives are straight out of George Orwell’s 1984,” she said. Her mother remains under house arrest.
In his first remarks after leaving Kashmir, former IAS officer, Shah Faesal, told us that the BJP had “destroyed” the mainstream in Kashmir. “Who will remain there to carry out mainstream politics, I don’t know,” he said, a week before he too was placed under house arrest.
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