Former Chief Minister of the erstwhile state of Jammu Kashmir and the president of the PDP, Mehbooba Mufti, on Saturday slammed GOI for imposing “a complete siege including a communications blackout.”
Mehbooba, responding to a tweet made by a Kashmiri Sikh woman expressing the ordeal of her family who lost a family member and were unable to communicate with anyone during the recent communications blackout, rendered GOI’s dubious claims of people of J&K enjoying equal rights as “barefaced lies.”
“GOI’s dubious claims that people of J&K now enjoy equal rights is a barefaced lie as truth is that even their basic human rights dead or alive are suspended with pervasive impunity,” Mehbooba said in the tweet.
She termed the “ease with which GOI imposes a complete siege including a communications blackout in Kashmir every time it anticipates a reaction from people” as “distressing & deeply insensitive.”
Mehbooba also warned that the misadventure of creating fear and suppression to “eliminate a sentiment is counterproductive since feelings & emotions don’t dissipate or vanish into thin air.”
She added that these “feelings of betrayal, subjugation & anger are absorbed & passed on from one generation to the next.”
The former Chief Minister pointed out how each time instead of reaching out, every successive policy of GOI was undertaken “to humiliate & collectively punish J&K.”
“These punitive actions compound this sense of betrayal and rage,” the PDP present concluded.
It’s pertinent to mention that as the senior Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani passed away on Wednesday, curfew-like restrictions and a communications blockade was imposed over the valley to thwart gathering of any kind.
Geelani’s family had alleged that the security forces snatched his body and did not let the family perform the final rites. Geelani was also laid to rest at a graveyard near his house instead of Srinagar’s Idgah Mazaar-e-Shohada, where he had willed to be buried.
Late in the evening, on Friday the Jammu Kashmir administration resumed the broadband internet services and the calling services in the valley. Mobile internet still remains blocked in the valley.