JAMMU AND KASHMIR, 30 December 2020, (TON): For young Kashmiri journalist, the fear of getting arrested or summoned by police always lurks around as Journalists have been attacked and press freedom curtailed since India stripped Kashmir of its special status last year.

A young Kashmiri journalist, Masrat Zahra, was charged under anti-terror law, Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), in April this year for allegedly posting “anti-national” content on social media. Zahra was among several Kashmiri journalists who were summoned by police early this year.

More complaints of “harassment” and “intimidation” by journalists followed during the course of the year as reporting from the region has been increasingly becoming difficult since India’s Hindu nationalist government introduced the Revised Media Policy following scrapping of the Article 370 of India’s constitution that granted the disputed region a measure of autonomy. The new media policy authorises government officers to decide on what is “fake news” and “anti-nationalism” – a step that media personnel say could be misused by authorities in the disputed region, where anti-India sentiments run high.

Since late last year, several local journalists have been summoned by police or investigating agencies for doing their professional duty. India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) raided the office of Greater Kashmir newspaper and the residence of AFP news agency’s journalist, Parvaiz Bukhari on October 28. This followed a week after office of the oldest English Daily of the region, Kashmir Times, was sealed.

“This was simply done to punish us for speaking the truth,” said Anuradha Bhasin, the Executive Editor, who had approached the Supreme Court against the communication blockade imposed last August.

In September, journalist Auqib Javeed said that he was slapped at the police station in Srinagar after summoned for doing a story on intimidation of Twitter users by the cyber cell of the police.

A few weeks later, three Kashmiri journalists – Fayaz Ahmad, Mudasir Qadri and Junaid Rafiq – were beaten up and their phones and cameras were taken away by police while they were doing their professional duty in southern Kashmir.

Senior journalists say the local administration, which takes orders directly from New Delhi, has launched a “a lethal assault” on journalism in Kashmir since downgrading the status of the region. New Delhi has since passed laws that will allow outsiders to settle in Kashmir, causing fears of demographic shift.

“We have witnessed our colleagues getting killed with bullets when the armed conflict was at its peak [during 1990s and early 2000s]. But, now the journalism itself is being killed with selective usage of laws and other methods,” says veteran journalist, Altaf Hussain, who has had a long stint with BBC news.

Meanwhile, Michael Kugelman, the Asia Program Deputy Director and Senior Associate for South Asia at the Washington based Woodrow Wilson Center said, “Before the Article 370 move, there would be periodic coverage of the dispute, with much of the focus on human rights abuses in Kashmir…But the spike in coverage after the Article 370 repeal far exceeded anything that had come for many years prior,”

“This was a clear indication that for the international press, the Article 370 move was about much more than what New Delhi shrugged it off as a routine internal and administrative change. In this sense, New Delhi’s decision to repeal Article 370 did more to internationalise the Kashmir dispute than anything Pakistan had done in previous years,” he further noted.