- A view from out of the Held Valley
By: Sadaf Aijaz
It was a sunny afternoon. The weather was quite pleasant and I was at Dalgate, heading towards Lal Chowk, I waited for few minutes at Ghat 9 and I saw a cab with only one seat left stopping next to me and the Driver shouting, “Lal Chowk, Lal Chowk”. I sat in the cab and after few minutes a man sitting on my right got a call and while he was talking to the other person, he uttered these words: “They have made our lives hell, now they have started this to disturb us, it is their strategy to irritate us, Don’t worry, we have been facing this for the last two decades.” Then he dropped the call.
“I was very curious to know what this man was talking about, what are we going to witness this time, My mind was going all through this and suddenly someone started to ask from the back of the cab, “What happened man?”, I turned back and saw a woman who seemed in her 60s.
She enquired from this young man, “What has happened, you seem to be disturbed after the call, is everything alright? Do you want to share? She started posing a lot of questions to this young man. I smiled and said to myself, “She is more curious than me to learn the details from this man.”
After sometime this man replied in a very low voice, “What should I tell you? Nothing new has happened as usual. £The same story, but this time the issue is quite different,” replied this man.
“I am from Anantnag [A district in South Kashmir 53 km away from Srinagar city]. I came to the city this morning for some personal work and the person who was calling me is my wife and she was quite worried about me. She was telling me that our nextdoor neighbour Ghulam Nabi’s son was been beaten up by security forces only for using VPN. They found VPN in his phone when he was returning back from Pampore. My wife called me, as she knows that I also had installed VPN in my phone last week, so she was urging me to delete that first and then head towards home.” He said this with a broad smile.
The central government uses every platform and delivers speeches to say that after scrapping Article 370 in Kashmir nothing has happened, people live free there and have access to everything, and are happy with this decision. So obviously the central government would not want the truth to come out as social media is the most powerful entity and if it is free, the world will get to know of the atrocities upon the Kashmiri people
As he was still smiling, the other passengers in the cab raised their voices “they can do anything, it was accepted, what has happened to our valley. I was looking at this old lady, she was lost in her thoughts. Reading her facial expressions, I could guess that she wanted to know all about VPN , and in a very low tone said, “Gubra yeh VPN-CPN kya hovai? ( My son, what is this VPN-CPN) is it something very dangerous.
The man replied, “No, my Mother, it is nothing like that,” and explained to her in Kashmiri what VPN was and why it was use. This old lady got an idea about VPN and in a very sarcastic tone said, “Who are they? How can they check our cell phones?”
The conversation was about to take a new turn, when the driver of the cab said, “We’ve reached Jahangir chowk.”
We all got off his cab and left for our destinations. As I crossed the road and looked at the faces around me, suddenly I saw some CRPF men toting guns. I had to cross them to reach my final destination, and I started feeling very anxious and various thoughts were striking me, like what if they check my cell phone, how will they react? To console myself I said to myself, “Don’t worry, so what if they did something like that? It’s just a VPN,” and I walked on.
I reached home but I was lost in my thoughts, “Why do we live in fear? Why don’t we have the right to do whatever we want to do? Why are we Kashmiris being threatened, beaten up , abused every time by everybody? Why do I live here where the air is full of terror.” Why was I behaving quite differently in front of the security forces as if I was carrying a weapon although I had only installed VPN in my cell phone.
VPN is not a weapon that can cause damage to someone, it is simply a virtual private network programming that creates safe, encrypted connection over a less secure network, such as the public Internet. VPN apps are used to bypass the firewall to access social media websites.
To learn more details, I took my phone and called my friend who is from South Kashmir’s Pulwama district and narrated the whole incident to her. She started giggling and replied, “Yes I also heard about such incidents taking place in South Kashmir. So what? This is not new, we are used to it,” she said.
“Are you going to uninstall this application?” I asked.
She answered very confidently, “No, my dear. I will use it, they do all this just to irritate us. otherwise using VPN is not a big deal. I’ve downloaded many VPNs and when one is blocked I simply jump to the next one,” she added.
It is pertinent to mention that this is not the first time that Kashmiris are using VPN. Back in 2016, when militant commander Burhan Wani was killed and the authorities shut down the Internet, people started using VPNs in order to bypass the censorship.
I don’t think it is a crime. Using a VPN doesn’t make you different from others. It’s simply an attempt to have free access to the outer world. Why do I not have freedom to browse whatever I wish and want to on the Internet? Are they going to tell us what to do and what not to, which application we can use and which not?
By beating my people, irritating them, they think that by using VPN the world should know the atrocities committed by them on us. As people must have taken pictures and shot videos in their mobile gadgets about what happened to the Valley after August 4. The central government uses every platform and delivers speeches to say that after scrapping Article 370 in Kashmir nothing has happened, people live free there and have access to everything, and are happy with this decision. So obviously the central government would not want the truth to come out as social media is the most powerful entity and if it is free, the world will get to know of the atrocities upon the Kashmiri people.
The writer is a freelance journalist in Indian Administered Kashmir
