The Latest Breaking News from Srinagar

On Monday, January 17, several journalists gathered outside the gates of the Kashmir Press Club in Srinagar’s Polo View.

It was almost midnight on August 14. At his home in South Kashmir’s Tral in Pulwama, Irfan Amin Malik, a journalist with Greater Kashmir, was getting ready to sleep when soldiers scaled the walls and banged on his door. 

What has changed for Kashmiri newspapers since the Indian government’s clampdown in the Valley last August? “It is better if you leave without hearing our answers,” replied an anxious editor at the prominent English daily Rising Kashmir, on a late December evening.

On August 4, Adil, 28, a photojournalist in Srinagar’s downtown area, was at his office in Lal Chowk. Unaffected by the social media rumours and political drama unfolding around him, Adil was researching photo-editing and new camera equipment in the market.

The officials issuing detention orders under the Public Safety Act in Jammu and Kashmir are mere rubber stamps. This is a common refrain among rights activists and lawyers fighting PSA cases. They argue that this law has been misused by the state ever since it received the governor’s assent on…

In the evening on August 4, the Indian government put Kashmir under a security lockdown and communications blackout to pre-empt protests against the dismantling of its special constitutional status. Over 40 days later, Kashmir is yet to return to “normal”, the state’s police chief Dilbag Singh admitted. 

When they weren’t traversing the valley for stories and reports, journalists in Kashmir could often be found at the Press Club in Srinagar or at the city’s so-called Media Facilitation Centre. While the former remained a territory of choice for most scribes, the latter became a territory of circumstance.

August 2 was the last day I spoke to my mother over the phone. It was a hurried conversation as I had a hectic schedule for my day ahead in New Delhi. News stories had begun emerging of curtailing the Amarnath Yatra and my mother, living in Sopore in Kashmir,…

The classrooms are empty. So are the corridors and playgrounds. There’s not a soul in the canteen. 

Most reports coming out of Kashmir, specifically Srinagar, have described and distilled the desolate, still and sieged state of the region as “curfew-like”. However, while all of Srinagar remains desolate, parts of it are more desolate than others.

At the “Media Facilitation Centre” in Srinagar’s Sarovar Portico, three glum faces await the arrival of Rohit Kansal, Jammu and Kashmir’s Principal Secretary of Planning. The three individuals are the family members of 28-year-old Irfan Amin Malik, a Tral-based journalist working for Greater Kashmir, the largest circulated daily in Kashmir.