Pub Date : 2019-01-24DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190858650.003.0013
Ravi Agrawal
The rat-a-tat of automatic gunfire burst through the morning air in Anantnag. For the locals of this troubled district in the south of Kashmir, it came as a shock but no longer a surprise. Separatist militants had once again clashed with army forces. Several civilians were caught in the crossfire. One died; three others were wounded. It was Saturday, July 1, 2017. Hours earlier, at midnight, India had adopted a new national sales tax, designed to stitch the country’s twentynine states together into one economic union. The new system—known as the Goods and Services Tax, or GST—was heralded as an economic reform that would spur growth, enlarge the tax base, and make it easier to do business. Kashmir was the only state still debating whether to join. It was a symbolic outlier. Some distance from the gunfire, sixteen-year-old Zeyan Shafiq was just waking up. He hadn’t heard the shooting; his home was well insulated. When he opened his eyes, he told me, the first thing he did was to reach for his iPhone. He looked at the screen and sighed. The wireless internet at home was down. So was mobile data. Shafiq got out of bed, put on his slippers, and shuffled toward the front door, where he knew he would have a stronger mobile signal. No luck. He couldn’t catch the internet. Shafiq looked up at the skies, opened his lungs, and let out a bellow of frustration. For Shafiq, it was easy to guess what had happened. There must have been what locals called an encounter—a skirmish between Kashmiri separatists and the state. These days, encounters were inevitably followed by the government shutting down the internet. The digital blackouts weren’t aimed at stopping separatists or terrorists from communicating. They were usually already dead. The shutdowns were to prevent people from sharing videos and photos of the violence on social media. In effect, 13 million Kashmiris were collateral damage, unable to do something as simple as check email. There was a time when curfews were merely physical, imposed with barbed wire, barriers, and troops on the streets.
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