While people in Kashmir have remained indoors for the last almost four months, many have jumped on to the information highway as rise in sale of internet connections indicates. Ikhlaq Qadri reports.
After curfews and shutdowns forced people to remain within the confines of their homes for more than 100 days, valleyites are increasingly getting on the virtual world to remain in touch with the outside world.
From Facebook to Twitter to Orkut; online news reading to e-book reading; chatting to downloading, Kashmiris, in the caged life, are getting hooked to the web. While most businesses in the region have suffered a huge setback, the telecom sector is, to the contrary, thriving.
The sales of data cards (wireless internet access cards) have shot up in the last three months and people in curfewed valley have bought thousands of internet connections. One of the positives, one may say of the caged life in Kashmir.
Apart from people, especially youth, using Facebook and other social networking sites to remain abreast of the situation or to give vent to their anger, a net-savvy culture is creeping into Kashmir life. The state-owned BSNL and Tata Teleservices are the main players in the broadband internet market in Kashmir. Both have robust growth when every other sector was shut down in Kashmir.
During the last fiscal quarter the sales of Tata internet devices (Photon) have gone up by nearly 20 percent which comes around to a whopping 4800 new internet connections a month. Relatively new comer in the Kashmir market, Tata Photon has emerged as the second largest internet service provider after state owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, which is often criticised for sub standard services.
“A few months back our average sale (for data cards) per month was 4000 connections which has gone up by 20 percent in the recent months,” a senior official with Tata Tele services said.
June 11, saw the beginning to mass agitation in Kashmir when a teargas shell killed a teenager. It has been over 100 days of curfew and shutdown, over 110 civilian killings, more than 2000 firearm injuries and hundreds of arrests. “Barring a few days of ‘normalcy’, I have not been able to come out of home. To keep myself engaged I, got a net connection,” says Iqbal Ahmad, a student from old city, who spends his curfewed days surfing and by getting onto social networking sites.
“Earlier I had access to internet at the college and I was not fond of net surfing and social networking. But in these few months I was connecting to Facebook on mobile phone and I often used to keep myself updated by browsing the latest news. It really seemed the only way of connecting to the world from home so I decided to bring an internet connection home,” Iqbal explains.
Many people working in financial sector, media or IT industries, are working out of their homes through internet.
“Nature of my job is that I cannot afford to stay disconnected from my co-workers and normally I would stay in office till late night. But as it has not been possible for me to move around due to curfews and restrictions, I had to work online from home. It prompted me to have a high speed internet connection at home,” says Sajad Ahmad, who works in an insurance company.
Many schools had started online tutorials for their students to make up for the time lost during shutdowns and curfews. Kashmir University was also mulling online tutorials for its students besides making examination papers available online. All this is apparently happening for the first time in Kashmir at a local level.
This definitely is making students tech-savvy and parents are not particularly against it.
“In July perhaps the school administration decided to go for online tutorials but the idea did not take off. However, it made us aware of the options, available with us for education of our children. And in absence of local news broadcasts internet is the only option to know about the situation,” says Sheikh Khursheed a resident of Anantnag district in South Kashmir. He uses BSNL’s Evdo (wireless internet) service.
Social networking especially Facebook has also emerged as new craze in the society. Besides using it for fun, people have been using the sites for lodging protests against civilian killings. Many videos showing police excesses, shot with cellphones, have been uploaded on sites like Youtube and Facebook. One such harrowing video showing police parading youth naked in rural Kashmir have had many hits and police lodged a case against Facebook and Youtube.
As there has been a marked increase in people taking to protesting on the internet, the government has launched a crackdown on people, especially youth, using internet to upload protest videos and making, what police calls “provocative” statements on Facebook. Mirwaiz south Kashmir Qazi Yasir was booked under Public Safety Act for “instigating violence through Facebook”, besides making “hate speeches in public.”
However, more than anything social networking sites have become the fastest source of local news in curfew and restrictions bound Kashmir.
“My son was glued to computer for hours together which irritated me always. But now he is the first one to tell us about the protest calendar brought out by the (separatist) leaders and now I think that internet is important,” says Farida a housewife, “Last time when there was no call for Hartal and government announced the relaxation in curfew. But my son learned from internet that undeclared curfew was maintained in many places and he was right.”
Whatever, the reasons Kashmir, mostly its younger generation, is getting hooked to the net. Ironically, the stifling restrictions on public movement has helped Kashmir to get on the information highway.
