Due to severe blockade, people are facing acute shortage of essential commodities including baby food and life-saving medicines and the valley represents a humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people are besieged and Jammu and Kashmir has become a big jail for its inhabitants.

Srinagar: In occupied Kashmir, the authorities continued to impose strict curfew and other restrictions across the Kashmir valley on the 20th consecutive day, today, to prevent people from holding demonstrations against Indian occupation and India’s move of ending special status to Jammu and Kashmir.

Due to severe blockade, people are facing acute shortage of essential commodities including baby food and life-saving medicines and the valley represents a humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people are besieged and Jammu and Kashmir has become a big jail for its inhabitants.

The Indian authorities have been maintaining a strict curfew in the Kashmir valley since 5th August when Narendra Modi government announced scraping of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir. Hundreds of thousands of Indian troops and police personnel deployed in every nook and corner of the territory are not allowing people to come out of their homes. The authorities also continue to impose information blockade as TV channels and internet links are snapped and restrictions on media remain in place since 5th August. Local newspapers could not update their online editions while majority of them could also not be printed due to curfew and other restrictions during all this period.

The authorities have put almost all Hurriyat leaders, including Syed Ali Gilani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, under house arrest or in jails. Over 10,000 Kashmiris including hundreds of political leaders and workers have been detained. The jails and police stations have run out of space and many detainees have been lodged in makeshift detention centres. A hotel in Srinagar being used as a makeshift detention centre has been declared a sub-jail. Around 50 pro-India political leaders are detained in the hotel.

On the other hand, the people of occupied Kashmir have been warned to beware of Indian collaborators who are trying to approach their Indian masters to bring the members of extremist Hindu organizations like Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and other Hindutva forces to the territory to make the Kashmiris slaves and snatch their everything including religious identity. The warning has been issued through posters and handbills by Hurriyat activists. The Indian collaborators also have been asked to adopt Hurriyat line and in case they provide any facilitation to Hindutva forces, they would face serious consequences.

The Indian authorities sent back a delegation of opposition parties of India from Srinagar airport. The move shows that Narendra Modi-led communal government was not ready to allow even Indian politicians to observe the prevailing situation of the territory.

Meanwhile, an Assistant Commandant of Indian Central Reserve Police Force committed suicide by shooting himself with his service rifle at his residence in Sadar area of Islamabad district. This incident raised the number of such deaths among Indian troops and police personnel to 440 since January 2007.