Kashmir Clampdown: A Local Journalist’s Story

“Harassed and briefly detained.” Journalist Aakash Hassan told Brut India about the problems he faced in covering the Kashmir lockdown.

Transcript

00:00The biggest challenge I faced in reporting Kashmir was the movement from one place to

00:21another place and the communication.

00:25I got the restrictions passed from administration but after two days that was torn apart by

00:31CRPF personnel, furious CRPF personnel.

00:35They went through my notes, they even after finding the details I had taken from the locals,

00:42they subjected me to like harassment.

00:58I was on my way to Shobyan and I had clicked some photographs of forces personnel checking

01:04vehicles at a check post and after four or five days I happened to visit an area in North

01:13Kashmir and again a police personnel, he checks my phone, he asks me to unlock my phone and

01:20goes through photographs and the notes.

01:22Then he asks me that you have taken the photograph the previous day, the other day.

01:28He asks me for whom I have taken the permission.

01:33On one day I left Srinagar to report in North Kashmir area and I was at a check point, I

01:40was detained just because I was talking to someone, I was talking to locals.

01:46There was a lot of questioning on why I have taken notes, why I have written what people

01:51have alleged against police and the forces.

01:54All my notes were deleted, the photographs I had taken were deleted.

01:59The police was also going, they were also trying to delete all the data from my phone.

02:04It was after like many hours that I was let go, that too after a lot of questioning and

02:11what I would say was completely harassment.

02:29The biggest challenge we face is how we file the stories, how we file the data to our offices,

02:39how we file the information.

02:41Our mind remains always occupied with this that we have to reach a particular place that's

02:46called media facilitation centre equipped with four computers and mobile phone.

02:52Entire journalist fraternity, around 200 journalists, sometimes more than that, in Kashmir rely

02:59on those four computers.

03:01It's not only the difficulty in how much time it's consuming, it's also about our privacy.

03:07You're using public computers and your passwords, your emails are in the public domain, I believe.