“Salaam Walekum, Mehvish,” said a voice on the other end of a call from an unknown number.
It took Mehvish Baba a few seconds to recognise that it belonged to her “mamu” (mother’s brother). The rest of the conversation went like this:
“Are you fine?”
“Yes.”
“We are fine. Do you need something?”
“No.”
“Is naani okay?”
“He said, my naani (grandmother) was fine and then the call dropped,” said the 27-year-old Kashmiri living in Gurgaon.
This 15-second conversation on Saturday morning was the first time in six days that Baba spoke with a family member in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), where the Indian government has severed mobile services and the internet to crush any backlash against bifurcating the northern state, revoking its special status, and demoting it to a union territory.
There was no time for Mehvish to wish her ‘mamu’ on the occasion of Eid ul Adha, one of the biggest festivals in Islam, which will be celebrated in Kashmir on Monday.
In fact, Mehvish, a program manager in the life insurance sector, has “no clue” how her uncle had managed to call her?
Did he call from one of the satellite phones given to high-ranking police personnel before the communication blackout, she wondered. Or did he stand for hours to use one of the two helpline numbers set up in the office of Srinagar District Magistrate Shahid Chaudhary on Thursday.
How long was cue that her ‘mamu’ might have stood in, she wondered. Were her parents standing next to her uncle and listening?
Mehvish, who was supposed to fly out to Srinagar to celebrate Eid with her family, felt that she had no choice but to cancel her plan.
“I live 25 kilometers away from the airport. I have no clue how I will even reach home in the middle of curfew,” she said. “This is the first time that I won’t return home for Eid, but the worst thing is that I won’t even be able to speak to my family and wish them.”
Kashmiris are used to curfews and curbs on the internet and mobile services —even on festivals — but the lockdown since 5 August has been unprecedented. In addition to internet and mobile services being severed, landlines and cable TV have also been suspended. Kashmiri media outlets have not been able to update their websites for a week. Over a 100 people, including politicians and activists, have been arrested.
Like Mehvish, the curfew compounded by the communication blackout has forced many Kashmiris living outside J&K to cancel their plans to go home for Eid.
Those who have had no communication with their family for seven days might even consider her lucky for getting to speak with a family member for 15 seconds.
Sameer Gojwari, a 32-year-old Kashmiri living in Mumbai, is worried sick about his parents and grandparents.
Gojwari, who works in a bank, said, “In a democratic country in 2019, I have not spoken to my family in a week. Parents have to wait for two hours to make a one minute call to their children. This is humiliating. This is unimaginable.”
This is humiliating. This is unimaginable.
Two helpline numbers for Srinagar
Even as the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government insists that people in J&K have welcomed these changes, a video of a protest in Soura, a locality on Srinagar, tweeted by the BBC on Saturday, suggests otherwise.
At least one Kashmiri, a 17-year-old from Srinagar, has been killed in the aftermath of the Modi government’s decision, while more have been hospitalised with pellet injuries — some to their eyes.
It took the district administration four days — after blocking all internet and mobile services — to provide two “helpline” numbers in Srinagar for those Kashmiris to reach friends and family living in mainland India and overseas.
In 2018, J&K had almost 14 million telecom subscribers, and 1.92 million internet subscriptions, according to the Indian government’s 2018 telecom statistics.
While the Modi government says the abrogation of Kashmir’s special status will grow business and boost investment in the conflict-ridden region, telecom operators are losingfour to five crores a day in the wake of the shutdown. Local businesses, which have been shuttered for a week, one Kashmiri businessman said, are “bleeding.”
At this point, multiple petitions against the communication blackout have been filed in the Supreme Court.
Two “helpline numbers” in Srinagar, a city of 1.2 million people, is an abomination.
There are reports of people queuing up for hours to make phone calls that last barely a minute. These are people who manage to reach the DM’s office in the middle of the curfew. There are others who either live too far or can’t make it beyond a certain number of security checkpoints.
It is important to note that these two helpline numbers are only for residents of Srinagar. Families residing in the rest of the Kashmir Valley, comprising ten districts, have no way of reaching their loved ones living outside J&K.
The number of incoming and outgoing calls, which Srinagar’s DM Shahid Chaudhary shared with HuffPost India, give a sense of how few people are being able to reach their loved ones.
HuffPost India cannot independently verify these figures.
The two helpline numbers and two other landline numbers set up in the DM’s office had received 367 calls from Kashmiris living outside J&K from Thursday morning to Friday afternoon, Chaudhary said on Friday at 1:30 pm.
At around 8:30 pm on Friday, Chaudhary said, “1,400 plus” calls, but he did not clarify whether these were incoming or outgoing. He also said that people were using two helpline numbers and four official phone numbers.
On Thursday, Chaudhary announced that government is “shortly’ setting up more than 350 helplines in Kashmir.
This “350 plus” announcement has triggered rumours of the phone and internet services being severed for months. This in turn is adding to — as Gojwari put it — the “panic bubble.”
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Public relations exercise?
Some Kashmiris claimed to have tried the helpline numbers “hundreds” of times only to find the phone lines busy or unreachable.
Gojwari had tried calling the helpline numbers to not only get a message through to his family in Srinagar, but also for two Kashmiri siblings who were trying to reach their father after their mother, a cancer patient admitted in a hospital in Mumbai, took a turn for the worse.
Gojwari said that he knew of at least four cancer patients in Mumbai, who were trying to reach their families in districts other than Srinagar — Rajouri, Anantnag, Sopore and Samba (Jammu) — where no helpline numbers are in place.
While Chaudhary claims that his office has “field officers” who are responding to the “specific requirements” of the people who are calling in, Gojwari doesn’t believe it.
If the Modi government had to sever internet and mobile phone services in order to bifurcate J&K and revoke its special status, making alternate arrangements for families to reach other is the least that the local administration could have done.
The fact that the two helpline numbers in Srinagar were set up four days after the communication blackout suggests that this has more to do with saving face amidst growing criticism in the international media, than a genuine desire to help people.
The families of the cancer patients, Gojwari said, need to be in touch with their relatives to call for things like money or a blood door, if and when the situation arises.
That the long-suffering cancer patients cannot speak with their families on Eid, he said, was heartbreaking. “You are cutting communication. This is inhuman.”
You are cutting communication. This is inhuman.
Canceled plans
For the first time in the eight years since he left Kashmir, Gojwan will not return home to celebrate Eid with his family. “This is distasteful. If they had to disrupt our lives, why not wait till after Eid. We all have such busy lives. This is the one time in the year that I can connect with my family, connect with my people. It’s emotional,” he said.
For Gojwani, leaving his wife and three-year-old son in Mumbai on their own is not an option. But he is equally scared of taking them to Kashmir, where they would have to navigate a curfew to reach his house in downtown Srinagar, which tends to be a hotbed of protests, stone-pelting and retaliatory fire.
Seared into Gojwani’s mind is that one day in 2016, when he got stuck in a curfew with his wife and son, then five-months old.
“I stopped at every barricade and begged my own people to let us go. I said, ‘I am a family man. I have my wife and son with me.’ It was humiliating,” he said. “This kind of thing leaves a deep impact on a person.”
As he talked about taking the 6:30 am flight to reach Srinagar in time to have tea with his family on Eid, every year, Gojwani sounded overwhelmed by the realisation that he won’t even be able to speak with them — even to explain his to his grandparents.
“My grandparents are 80 years old. They look forward to my coming, every year. You know how grandparents are, They say, ’You must come. Who knows if we will be around next year.′ My grandmother counts the days until I return,” he said.