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Kashmir
This Week in AsiaPolitics

100 days after Modi’s Kashmir clampdown, locals see bleak future

  • With paramilitary troops monitoring Kashmiris and an internet blackout ongoing, locals say the loss of freedom has affected their mental health
  • Businesses have been forced to shut, young people see no future in Kashmir as India continues to bring the region under its rule

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Kashmiri journalists protest against the internet blackout in Srinagar on November 12, 2019. Photo: AFP
Fahad Shah
Jammu and Kashmir on November 12 marked 100 days since India revoked the autonomy of the Muslim-majority region.
Since then, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has moved to bring the region under direct rule, cut telecommunications, and detained thousands of people, including pro-India politicians, to quell any unrest. Shops and businesses have remained shut to protest against the controversial decision, children have not been going to school, and streets are deserted.

Many Kashmiris say Modi’s lockdown is a direct attack on their identity as a minority community. As the locals struggle to adapt to a new normal, some shared their thoughts on how the revocation has affected their current lives, three months on.

SEHAR MUNEER, 30, HOME-MAKER

Everybody has been suffering. We are all adjusting to a new reality. So much has happened in Kashmir in the past decade. I lost my father in 1998 in a shooting incident; he was just a civilian. We have become used to all this, but I feel bad for our children, who have been sitting idle at home for months.

As a woman, a housewife, a mother, I don’t want to stay here considering the uncertainty – every year, something new happens here. Everyone is suffering mentally, from the older generation to our children. If we rent out our homes, we are sure native Kashmiri owners will be thrown out.

How many years it has been like this? Nobody will let the situation get better. The Indian media has turned Kashmiris into terrorists. If we listen to India, we will die; if we listen to someone else, we will die – in every way it is civilians who suffer. But what can we do? If Allah has written this in our destiny, we have to live it.

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