India brutal crackdown on Kashmir || کشمیر میں بھارت کا وحشیانہ کریک ڈاؤن
India brutal crackdown on Kashmir || کشمیر میں بھارت کا وحشیانہ کریک ڈاؤن Four Kashmiri journalists who have been arbitrarily detained must be released immediately, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
India brutal crackdown on Kashmir || کشمیر میں بھارت کا وحشیانہ کریک ڈاؤن An influential watchdog has denounced the crackdown on the media and the detention of journalists in the area as New Delhi hosts a Group of 20 (G20) tourism meeting in Indian-administrated Kashmir.
Press freedom is still being attacked, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), despite India’s efforts to portray the disputed area as normal.
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list of four things One of four G20 tourism meetings is held in India, under tight security.
list 2 of 4 G20 meetings hosted by India in Kashmir would be skipped by China 3 of 4 Is hosting the G20 gathering an attempt by India to depict ‘normalcy’ in Kashmir?
list India detains a Kashmiri journalist 4 out of 4 in the ongoing media campaign.
“CPJ calls on the Indian government to end its brutal crackdown on the media and immediately release the four arbitrarily detained Kashmiri journalists,” the group stated in a statement. on its website. on Twitter on Monday. It demands the release of Asif Sultan, Fahad Shah, Sajed Gul, and Irfan Mehran, all of whom are journalists.
Sultan, a journalist with the Kashmir Narrator magazine, was detained in 2018 in accordance with the strict Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), a law deemed “anti-terror.” His family claims he was targeted because of the articles he wrote, despite the fact that he was accused with murder, attempted murder, and harboring rebels. India’s ‘brutal’ crackdown on Kashmir‘s
Shah served as the Kashmir Walla website’s editor. Under the same UAPA law, he was detained in February of last year for “glorifying terrorism” in his works. Gul, a magazine employee of Shah’s, was detained in January of last year for disseminating “false narratives” regarding Indian domination in the country’s sole area with a Muslim majority.
Gul was arrested in accordance with the Public Safety Act, a preventative detention statute that allows for the possibility of a year or more in jail without the possibility of bail.
Due to his involvement with the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, a local human rights organization where he once worked as a researcher, Mehran was imprisoned two months ago on “terrorism”-related accusations.
It is challenging for their families to visit the four journalists because they have all been transported to prisons outside of Indian-administrated Kashmir.
Press freedom in the region declined after August 5, 2019, when the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi forcibly took Kashmir from its limited autonomy and brought it under New Delhi’s direct sovereignty.
Thousands of people were detained as New Delhi strengthened its control over the region, which is also claimed by Pakistan’s neighbors. Among those detained were numerous well-known politicians, activists, journalists, and lawyers.
Since then, Modi’s administration has implemented a number of rules and regulations that inhabitants claim are intended to violate their rights and prevent them from supporting themselves.
Kashmiri journalists claim that since 2019, when the houses of numerous journalists were raided and they were called in by the police for questioning, they have had to work in an environment of terror. Many journalists claim that they are compelled to self-censor.
Observers characterized the measures as India’s attempts to intimidate the media into not covering the regional reality.
“Real picture”
In its annual World Press Freedom Index, the Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders put India 161 out of 180 nations this year, the lowest position ever for the largest democracy in the world.
The CPJ issued its statement as more than 60 foreign delegations and senior Indian government figures began to assemble in Srinagar, the region’s capital, on Monday for a three-day conference to advance international travel.
As the delegates gather at a resort on the shores of Srinagar’s renowned Dal Lake, police officials and paramilitary troops are stationed behind signs and cubicles that have been constructed throughout the city. The picturesque city’s military bunkers have been painted blue, and the tar on the roads has recently been applied.
Locals have been prohibited from areas close to the primary arena, while several areas of the city have shuttered their schools until Wednesday.
The last elected chief minister of the area, Mehboob Mufti, claimed on Sunday that Kashmir had been transformed into “Guantanamo Bay,” the American military jail in Cuba, in preparation for the G20 summit.
The summit, the first foreign event in the region since 2019, is being held with increased security measures, despite the fact that there are no longer any obvious traces of security deployments in one of the most militarized places in the world.
A number of meetings are being held around India, which is hosting the G20 presidency this year, in preparation for the summit that will take place in New Delhi in September.
The G20 summit in Kashmir has been boycotted by China, which has an ongoing border issue with India, and criticised by Pakistan, which is not a member of the G20.
According to reports in the Indian media on Tuesday, there are signs that Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt have also avoided the event.
Kashmiri political expert Siddiq Wahid told Al Jazeera that it is obvious that the Indian administration is attempting to depict normalcy by holding the G20 meeting in the area.
The absence of China, he said, “has dealt a blow to give that [normalcy] impression for New Delhi.”
India’s ‘brutal’ crackdown on Kashmir’s
According to Geeta Sues, co-founder of the Free expression Collective, an organization that promotes freedom of expression in India, “the barricading of security bunkers behind happy and picturesque pictures of A good example of the state of press freedom in the valley is Kashmir during the G-20 summit.
Sues stated that “journalists are imprisoned and others’ access and mobility are severely constrained.” Will [G20] delegates be permitted to discuss the real situation? Or content with what they are permitted to see?
