Diary of Srinagar lockdown

August 08, 2019 13:50

"I may have never ever felt so shut out and so shut down. Not during the protracted military operations of the IPKF in northern Sri Lanka. Not during the many weeks I was on the frontier reporting the Kargil war. Not during the Tahrir Square uprising in Cairo. Not even during the darkest I have witnessed in Kashmir over the past decades.... This was not even censorship, not about what you can or cannot report. This was being cut out and left cold."

- The Telegraph's Sankarshan Thakur returned to New Delhi from Srinagar on Wednesday and wrote this diary on the information blackout.

A reporter's worst nightmare is not being able to tell the story; this week, the powers enacted it coldly, and with singular completeness. But it's poor form to complain of being pinched when everything around you is being hammered. The reporter in Kashmir this week was a niggling collateral to seismic enactments whose impulsive after-tremors have been stilled by jackboots and commanded at gunpoint to behave.

These are fragments from a diary that lay proscribed for days. Do read

File pic.

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