Srinagar, March 19, 2020: Press freedom in Indian occupied Kashmir is “under a serious threat from security forces”, the International Press Institute (IPI) has said in a report.Raising concerns about the conditions of journalists in the disputed Muslim-majority region, the global media watchdog urged India’s Hindu nationalist government to end restrictions and harassment of journalists placed following revocation of the region’s special status last August.“Journalism in Jammu and Kashmir is under a dramatic state of repression,” Ravi R Prasad, director of advocacy at the Vienna-based IPI, said in a statement.“The state is using a mix of harassment, intimidation, surveillance and online information control to silence critical voices and force journalists to resort to self-censorship.”
Naseer Ganai, who has been working as a journalist in Kashmir for more than 10 years, told Al Jazeera that he was called by the counterinsurgency forces on February 9 and interrogated for four hours.
“They called me and took my phone, my laptop. They told me they want to check where do statements or mails for stories come. I don’t know what they did with my phone and laptop,” he said.
“They kept me interrogating for hours. This means in this place even my phone or laptop is not my own. They can call anytime and take it. There is no privacy to work for journalists here, this is mentally very disturbing.”
Ganai said the incident was “completely shocking” for him and he was asked to give them “every detail”.
The report is the latest in a series of damning criticisms of the Indian government’s months-long security and communication lockdown of Kashmir by international watchdogs.
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in its statement last month urged the authorities to stop harassment of journalists in the region.
“In these critical times in occupied Kashmir, police must stop harassing and questioning journalists and allow them to do their jobs without fear of reprisal,” said Aliya Iftikhar, CPJ’s senior Asia researcher in New York last month.
“The Indian government should lift all remaining internet restrictions and let journalists get back to work.”
IPI asked the Indian government to restore full internet and social media access in the disputed territory where slow-speed internet service was restored earlier this month after nearly seven months of blackout.
“Working without internet or only with restricted internet has severely hindered journalists from reporting about developments in remote parts of Kashmir … Journalists have been forced to rely on press briefs issued once or twice a week by the state government, without possibilities to verify the stories,” the report said.
The authorities in Kashmir will review the restoration of internet services on March 26 whether its speed should be restricted to 2G.
Meanwhile, the government has also filed cases against unnamed people for using VPN to access social media sites after the government allowed partial internet in January but kept a ban on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
Before the government decision to strip the region’s limited autonomy on August 5, New Delhi rushed tens of thousands of additional troops to the Himalayan region, which already hosts nearly half a million Indian forces.
Journalists, many of whom requested anonymity, told IPI that it has become a common practice for the police to ask them to reveal their sources.
“Press freedom in occupied Kashmir is under serious threat from the security forces and the regional administration since August [2019],” the IPI statement said.
The Kashmir Press Club, a local body of journalists, said there have been at least 10 incidents of harassment and intimidation faced by journalists at the hands of security forces.
Masrat Zahra, a multimedia journalist based in Kashmir, goes to a government-run media facilitation centre every day, travelling 8km (5 miles), from where she accesses the internet to file pictures and videos.
“For me, the curbs continue and there are hundreds like me. The situation continues to be a challenge,” she said.
“There is some relaxation like phone and internet works now but it’s very slow. I can’t do any work. It’s frustrating. I still have to travel to send an email for my work. It’s still tough,” she said.
Moazam Muhammad, the vice president of Kashmir Press Club, also said there has been a “little relief” after the restoration of the internet. “The low speed on mobile phones is hampering journalists to work from home,” he said.
“There are still cases of journalists being harassed by the authorities, their equipment is being snatched and they are being asked to collect them from police stations. We witnessed two such cases recently,” he said.
Kashmiri journalists share fraternity’s woes with PCI delegation
Srinagar, March 17, 2020 : A team of Kashmir Press Club has met a three-member delegation of the Press Council of India (PCI), who is on a four-day visit to Kashmir, and informed them about the hardships faced by the local media fraternity in Jammu and Kashmir.
A spokesperson for Kashmir Press Club in a statement issued in Srinagar said that Press Club team members comprising Shuja-ul-Haq, Moazum Mohammad, Ishfaq Tantry and Farooq Javed Khan met the three-member Press Council of India in Srinagar.
Interestingly, the PCI team’s visit is seen by many as a damage-control exercise because its chairman had justified media gag after the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir by the Modi government in India.
“The Kashmir Press Club told the visiting delegation that the period since the August 5 abrogation of Article 370 has been the toughest time for the Kashmir media, during which journalists faced harassment, summons, intimidation and censorship,” he said.
Pointing to the communications blackout, the KPC team told the PCI delegation that since August 5, 2019, Kashmir witnessed the longest internet curfew in the modern history, which severely hampered the working of the press in the territory and termed the harsh measures as a press gag.
The KPC members also raised questions over the conduct of the Press Council of India (PCI) and pointed out that the PCI during this time has failed to show solidarity with the Kashmiri journalists when they were facing existential threats and the most troubling times. “The Club also pointed out the unethical stand taken by the PCI chairman wherein he had justified the restrictions imposed by the government post abrogation of Article 370,” the spokesperson said.
“The communications shutdown and the largest internet shutdown ever deeply impacted the journalist from Kashmir, and was in a way a deep question mark over the freedom of the press in the region,” the statement added.