Thursday 28th of March 2024
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   Op-ed
Kashmir’s vanishing newspaper archives
  Date : 28-03-2024

In a long-troubled region of India, articles critical of the national government are being erased from the websites of local news outlets. Journalists believe that pressure from New Delhi is to blame

AAKASH HASSAN: On a summer day, at his home in Srinagar, journalist Hilal Mir was sitting with his laptop, researching an article. He was looking for a news story that he had written for the local newspaper Kashmir Reader back in 2016, but multiple Google searches failed to turn up the report.

Mir went directly to the paper’s website and typed the headline in its search field. A message saying “No results found” popped up on the page. He then looked for his own author page, but it, too, had disappeared. In 2014, Mir was hired as the editor of the Kashmir Reader and had held the position until 2018, so was puzzled to find four years’ worth of his written work missing from the website.

Growing increasingly curious, he looked for the author pages of former colleagues, but could not find them, either. Then, searching for the bylines of people who continue to work for the paper, he discovered that, while their latest articles were available, nothing dated back further than October 2019. He began to wonder whether it was a glitch in the system, or something more sinister.

It turns out that Mir, 46, is just one of dozens of reporters in Kashmir whose work has disappeared from the websites of local newspapers. Many reporters and editors now tell stories of publications deliberately erasing their work or removing it from public display, following what they believe to be mounting pressure from the Indian government to limit coverage critical of its actions in the territory.

Kashmir is a disputed Himalayan region nestled between India, Pakistan and China. While both India and Pakistan have claimed the territory in full since Partition in 1947, all three countries hold portions of it. The major part, however, is under Indian administration, as the union territories of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh. A popular rebellion against New Delhi’s rule has been underway for the past 74 years, during which time India and Pakistan have fought three wars of ownership. Among the long-discussed options for Kashmir’s future, merging with Pakistan and independence are the two most popular choices with people who live there, both of which the Indian government continues to resist vehemently.

For visiting journalists, Kashmir, surrounded by snow-covered mountains and filled with scenic lakes, has long provided a story of loss, pain and dangerously escalating tensions between hawkish nuclear powers. Local reporters like Mir, however, have spent years documenting the struggles of daily life there, from ground zero and with unmatched depth. Their work forms a vital record of wide-ranging human rights violations linked to the Indian armed forces, including rape, torture and the killing and disappearance of hundreds of political activists and civilians — one that many believe the government is attempting to to expunge.

Rising Kashmir is one of the region’s most popular English-language dailies. Established in 2008, its office is located, along with most other Srinagar-based publications, in the crimson-painted government apartments of the city’s press enclave.

 

According to Riz — a former editor, who asked to be referred to under a pseudonym, citing security concerns — one winter afternoon in 2019, an office manager at the paper demanded login details for its website and social media accounts from technical staff. The next day, the IT manager complained to Riz about the “unprofessional manner” in which the website had been tampered with. Riz was astonished to find that all of his previous articles had disappeared.

That evening, as staff filled the newsroom for the next day’s edition, Riz and a number of his colleagues took up the issue with the paper’s editor-in-chief, Hafiz Ayaz Gani.

“He told us that we were updating from our old website to a new one, which would be more interactive and user-friendly,” Riz recalled. He and his colleagues were relieved to be told that all of the deleted pieces would be back online in a few days.

The website was, indeed, updated. Boasting a fresh masthead design and font, its homepage had a whole new look. But, according to Sub, another Rising Kashmir staffer, “weeks passed, and then months, but the missing data did not get updated.”

“We reached out to technical staff,” Sub said. “The answer was worrying: ‘I can’t do anything. Ask the boss.’”

At least seven former and current employees at Rising Kashmir have confirmed that, upon raising the matter again, they were told by Gani to focus on bringing in “stories of youth and positivity,” not the hard news that “used to happen in the past.”

“Now the newspaper has no data before 2019,” Sub told me.

A selection of pages from local Kashmir news outlets

Gani became the editor-in-chief of Rising Kashmir after his predecessor, the veteran journalist Shujaat Bukhari, was assassinated by gunmen, along with his two bodyguards, outside the office in June 2018. India’s government blamed the killing on the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Kashmir has long been India’s greatest flashpoint: part of the wider nation, yet separate, and riven with fear and suspicion on both sides. To India’s government —  led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party — it is widely viewed as a restive, predominantly Muslim anomaly, at odds with the values and identity of a majority-Hindu nation. Meanwhile, many Kashmiris have for years believed that New Delhi wishes to bring the region to heel by changing its demographic character.

In August 2019, those fears became more real. India’s government imposed harsh restrictions on Jammu and Kashmir, unilaterally revoking the constitutional autonomy held by the region since 1954 and dividing it into two federally controlled territories. In addition to overturning a number of long-standing laws — including one prohibiting the sale of land to non-Kashmiris — hundreds of people were detained. Communication lines, including the internet and mobile networks, were also severed.



  
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