Altaf Hussain Wani
In Indian occupied Kashmir, the media has been under fire for the past several years. In addition to the Indian government’s control of the communication process, the unwanted and uncalled for curbs on media such as surveil-lance, formal/informal investigations, harass-ment, intimidation, restrictions in all the proc-esses of news-gathering have hugely hampered the journalistic activities in the region besides undermining the role of free media.
With these restrictions in place, the free media in occupied Kashmir was rendered toothless and practically dysfunctional in the sense that they were totally unable to report the truth.
Rather than debating the most pressing issues newspapers published from Kashmir valley were deprived of the editorial voice.
Prominent writers and regular columnists who have written consistently on the Kashmir issue were completely silenced.
The Indian state directly pressured local print and news media to blackout stories related to the police, army, and paramilitary’s use of disproportionate force on protestors, and curbs on freedoms of expression and speech.
This forced silence created a sort of vac-uum that was later on filled by the social me-dia, which provided marginalized Kashmiris the access and space denied to them in the mainstream media.
Educated youth within and outside Kashmir found it a unique opportunity to engage themselves with digital platforms to counter India’s concocted and baseless narra-tives on Kashmir.
Unfortunately, in the aftermath of 5th Au-gust 2019, the Kashmiri social media users within and outside Kashmir were denied and deprived of the right of expression of their voices in the digital platforms-the only space wherein Kashmiris felt free to express them-selves.
How Kashmiri voices were silenced across the social media, how marginalized Kashmiris were rendered voiceless and how the visibility of the Kashmir issue in the international arena was brutally suppressed, how Kashmiri users’ accounts were disabled, suspended, and per-manently deleted/removed on flimsy grounds the Stand-with-Kashmir(SWK),a non-government non-profit organization based in New York in its recently released report un-covers the truth behind the digital siege and its devastating impacts on Kashmiris and the their case of the right to self-determination.
The first of its kind report also gives an in-depth insight into the profound harm that re-sults when corporations impose digital silence on Kashmiris.
It provides a comprehensive analysis of the methodology the Indian apart-heid regime adapted to enable complete silence on Kashmir within the state of Jammu and Kashmir and beyond.
It lays bare the nexus between the digital platforms and the Indian government and shows how social media cor-porations have worked hand in glove with the government of India in stifling of content and user profiles critiquing India’s authoritarian policies in Kashmir.
And how social media corporations have violated their own publicly reiterated commitments towards the interna-tional standards of freedom of expression.
This report also breaks the myth of social media being an absolute defender of free speech, empowering the disenfranchised by handing them a global megaphone with which to speak directly to the world.
Shedding the light on how social media was silencing Kashmiri voices, the report while citing the summer uprisings of 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2016 in Kashmir shows how the Indian auto-cratic government centralized information and made communications platforms to surveil Kashmiri social media users to ensure full con-trol and censor of their speech.
Employing both qualitative and quantita-tive methods the Stand-With-Kashmir reports based on online polls, interviews, detailed sur-vey tools created with a set of questions about the method of censorship employed by the platforms and pre-existing media reports, and human rights documentation of censorship experienced by Kashmiris in the digital space.
Based on these experiences the Stand-with-Kashmir team has been able to produce this comprehensive document that unveils digital platforms’ dubious and dodgy role they played to help the Indian fascist regime in curtailing the freedoms of speech and expression of Kashmiris and to suppress their political aspi-rations during the tumultuous period of time when the entire Kashmir valley was turned into an information black hole for the rest of world by imposing digital siege that lasted for more than 14 months.
Without mincing any words, the report says that corporations are siding with India’s sup-pression of Kashmiri digital rights, including the government’s blockade of internet and telecommunications access in the region.
