![]() We didn't know whether our relatives who live around the Valley were OK. We didn't know if people living across the street from us were OK. At one point, the Indian military wouldn't even let us walk on the street immediately outside my house. We had no contact with the outside world. We weren't allowed to step outside our houses because there was a curfew. I stayed in Kashmir for nine days before coming back to Delhi, and it was like living in a black hole. We just kept talking to each other for emotional support. Everybody around me who had families in Kashmir was freaking out too. But usually, it comes back in a few days, and the phones still work. In Kashmir, we're used to having the internet shut down frequently. "Don't panic," my mom told me before she hung up. We knew something was going to happen, but nobody knew what. The last time I spoke to my parents was five minutes before they shut down the phones and the internet in Kashmir on August 4. I kept dialing phone numbers constantly, but I couldn't contact Mom and Dad in Kashmir. When the internet and telephone blackout happened, my mental health plummeted. I moved to New Delhi from Kashmir a month ago for an undergrad degree in political science. To better understand what is happening to ordinary people, BuzzFeed News spoke to five Kashmiris who have been in and out of the region: a college student desperately trying to reach her parents, a restaurateur who turned his Instagram into a communications hub, a man desperately trying to ship medicine to his father-in-law, a startup founder cut off from the marketplace, and a college student trapped indoors. And the situation doesn’t seem to be improving: On Friday, India imposed fresh restrictions on Kashmir, telling people to stay off the streets. But Kashmiris who spoke to BuzzFeed News said that the scale of this particular blackout was unprecedented - in addition to mobile internet services, landline and broadband services are frozen, and most local television channels have been turned off.įour weeks into the blackout, life in Kashmir has come to a standstill, with pharmacies running out of essential medicines, newspapers unable to function, and strict curfews making it impossible to move around after dark. According to the Software Freedom and Law Centre, a New Delhi–based digital advocacy organization, this was the 55th internet shutdown in Kashmir in 2019 alone. It isn't the first time that internet services have been shut down in Kashmir. 4, India's Hindu nationalist government abruptly wiped out the legal autonomy that the disputed region has enjoyed for decades, and shut down the region’s internet. For 29 days, the residents of Kashmir, the conflict-ridden state in northern India, have been living in a black hole. ![]()
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