The sound of silence

I woke up this morning and, while still beneath the covers, reached for my phone. I checked mail, messages, WhatsApp, and Signal to see if anything had come in while I was asleep that would impact my day: someone I needed to meet, someplace I needed to be at. I then rapidly scrolled through my Twitter timeline to see if anything major had broken during the night.

I made myself a cup of coffee, came to my workdesk, fired up my laptop, and opened the ‘Morning News’ bookmarks folder, within which I collect the sites I need to check to get a broad overview of what’s happening in the world.

It’s my daily routine, and on the rare days when my internet provider stuffs up, or I am traveling in some remote area where the connection is splotchy, not being able to do any or all of this leaves me uncomfortable; I am aware of a nagging sense of unease.

Think for a moment about Kashmir, where all of those things I take for granted — the ability to check messages, to keep myself updated on happenings in my country and around the world, to check my bank balance and plan my finances, to work, to read for profit and for pleasure — have all been shut down since August 5 last year.

Executive Editor of Kashmir Times Anuradha Bhasin had approached the Supreme Court challenging the shut-down and seeking immediate lifting of the restrictions on communications. That was on August 10. It took the Supreme Court six months to hear the case — and when it did, it declared that the shut-down was “unconstitutional”. (The judgment is here for those interested).

So what would you expect the Supreme Court, the ultimate defender of the Constitution, to do in the case of an act it deems unconstitutional? Order that restrictions be lifted? What the court in effect did was tell the government, what you did was wrong, so you review it and do what you think is right.

Leaving it to the government to review its own unconstitutional act was never going to end well, was it? It didn’t.

I’m no lawyer (and if there is one thing I’ve learned in three-plus decades as a journalist, it is to not write about things I am not qualified to understand). But we now — if we are outside Kashmir, that is — have access to lawyers who are on social media; that access has meant that media houses are able to tap into them for informed commentary.

There is an abundance of such commentary on the net, accessible via a simple Google search. Here are just four that I think is worth reading to get a broad understanding:

• In this piece, constitutional lawyer Gautam Bhatia places the SC judgment of January 10 in context of the court’s actions (and inactions) in a previous case of suspension of basic human rights: the Emergency.
• Here, Bhatia points out that while the SC judgment does little in the way of providing immediate and total relief, it does lay the groundwork for future legal challenges against the Modi government’s indiscriminate use of the internet shutdown as a weapon to stifle dissent.
• Manu Sebastian in Live Law questions the SC’s failure to address the “emergency” nature of the case it was hearing, and argues that this failure is hugely problematic.
• Apar Gupta argues that when it came to choosing between human rights and the government of the day, the SC leaned towards the latter. It is, he says, a ‘statist interpretation’ of the law.
• Dushyant Dave notes the cautious optimism the SC judgment has led to, and says it is a sign that the rest of India has reconciled itself to the ‘othering’, the ‘orphaning’ of Kashmir. (A point I will come back to later, because that is what led me to write this post in the first place)

There is plenty more in the form of commentary, but the above stories suffice to provide a broad overview of the legal minuses — and a few slender silver linings — of the judgment. But what of the aftermath?

The GoI has partially restored broadband and 2G services in J&K. And you can access 153 websites that the government has “whitelisted”. There are other provisions, restrictions, but focus on just these for now and ask yourself — how does this comply with the SC judgment?

But that is precisely the point: the government’s gameplan is to do as little as possible in seeming compliance, then wait for a legal challenge to emerge. (And given the tardiness of the SC in hearing the original complaint, it is a fair assumption that between them, the GoI and the SC can continue to run out the clock).

There is another clause the GoI has inserted into this partial restoration of the internet: ISPs have been ordered to build firewalls to ensure that the people of Kashmir have no access to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms.

“There are fears that locals will log on to these social media platforms and upload videos recorded in the past five months, posing threat to the current calm in Kashmir,” a senior police officer told The Hindu. “Besides, Pakistan may also use the social media to coordinate with militants.”

“Fears”.

The GoI “fears” that the people of Kashmir might go on social media to upload videographic evidence of what happened in the state during the six-month blackout. So what is it precisely that the GoI fears? That stories such as this — dismissed thus far as coming from “vested interests” — will now come out into the open? That the full extent of the damage — both economic and social — will begin to come out? That the human rights abuses will now get a public airing?

While going through an Evernote folder last night, I came across this story I had saved, of the lengths to which Kashmiris have had to go to access basic communications facilities. And I just went back and checked the list of the 153 websites the government has permitted Kashmiris to access.

If I was in Kashmir now, I’d be totally hamstrung. I can’t access WhatsApp, or Twitter, or any other social media sites — which is the first thing I do every morning. And not a single one of a little over four dozen websites I check each morning for the news appears in that list.

In a piece this morning in The Wire, Siddharth Varadarajan makes the larger point:

Make no mistakes: This firewall is an augury of what the future holds for us all if the Modi-Shah approach to fundamental rights is allowed to prevail. For the first time since the Emergency, the government is arrogating to itself the right to tell citizens what they can and cannot read. Indeed, Modi has gone step beyond Indira Gandhi. She ‘only’ had her censors black out select news items and opinions. Our Dear Leader, on the other hand, has decided that digital news of any kind is to be blacked out from Kashmir.

How are we still silent? How did we remain silent about this gross, continuing injustice all these six months? Why was this egregious and continuing violation of our basic rights not important enough for us to take to the streets en masse? How did we slip into this mindset of thinking of Kashmir as being somehow not a part of India, of thinking that its concerns do not concern us? How did we become okay with what Dushyant, in the piece linked to earlier in this post, called the “orphaning” of Kashmir?

When I began blogging again recently, after a prolonged interval, I had started my first post with a quote from MLK Jr’s seminal “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. I’ll leave you with that same quote, because the thought MLK expressed is, I think, central to our today’s and tomorrows.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

PSA: A million images now

The British Library has just released over a million images onto Flickr Commons, free to download, use, repurpose. The details, here.

And for those looking for stock photos to burnish their writing, here you go: 20 sites that provide free photos.

Reading matter

If Americans were polled on a single question — “Name the primary grievance behind the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001” — how many would get it right, wonders Girish Sahane on his blog. [Charlie Sheen has his own answer]. Two other 9/11 stories I read this morning: one woman asks if she even wants to know the truth any more, while another [older story that I found through the related links segment] struggles with the guilt that 9/11 changed her life for the better.

Here’s 9/11, as seen at the time from outer space. Elsewhere premiere sand artist Sudharshan Pattnaik pays tribute in the form he knows best. [Unrelated but fun, check out the underwater sculptures of Jaison de Caires Taylor]

Also read, John McWhirter on moving on to a different world.

Elsewhere, Sepia Mutiny on Lisa Ray, the actress currently battling a rare form of cancer. Lisa’s blog here.

Earlier this week on Prospect, there was this story of the coming glut of drugs to mess with improve the mind. Now here’s Wired, with the secrets of eternal smarts.

While we mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet [timeline; a graphic representation of growth], spare a thought for Winston the carrier pigeon.

This week, a South African call-center business, frustrated by persistently slow Internet speeds, decided to use a carrier pigeon named Winston to transfer 4 gigabytes of data between two of its offices, just 50 miles apart. At the same time, a computer geek pushed a button on his computer to send data the old-fashioned way, through the Internet.

Winston the pigeon won. It wasn’t even close.

From LiveScience, the success secret of top tennis players: good eyes. More secrets: the trick to winning big tournaments is to dress smart, and make a noise. Still with tennis: fans, give this a go.

Great read: NYT reporter Stephen Farrell was kidnapped by the Taliban last Saturday — and blogs the experience. In the New Yorker, George Packer on Sultan Munadi, the local journo who died in that same kidnap, and on the relationship between foreign journalists and local fixers.

15 people died in a boating accident in Bulgaria. Madonna caused it. [Hat Tip: Amit Varma on Twitter]

From Cricinfo: the art, craft, and magic of two legendary spin bowlers. Clip:

Thus the myth enters the imagination. So the bowler pays up, and pays up again and again till the batsman coughs it up and hands it over sheepishly. The phrase “buying a wicket” was now de rigueur all of a sudden. It also proceeded to cause endless headaches every time Bedi was bowling. Following the progress of the match became a temporal jigsaw puzzle that had no solution. Every ball was a head-scratcher in itself: furious thinking would ensue as one tried to place it in a pattern initiated overs ago. Or was a new sequence of trickery starting with it? Now, was that a set-up ball, to be cashed in by the Sardar a few overs later, or just a bad one? Or was it just an innocent bridge piece in the composition before the cymbal crash came, causing the batsman to walk back? Wicket balls were the easy ones, and a relief, too, for they reset the puzzle. Yes, those times were magical. The period when the strategy has sunk in but the tactics are shrouded in mystery.

This merits a separate blog post of its own, but in the midst of much, so: Read this and weep — The Allahabad High Court sees fit to not merely set aside the death sentence against Moninder Singh Pandher in the 2006 Nithari killings, but to acquit him altogether. Surinder Koli, the domestic servant who was Pandher’s partner in crime, however gets it in the neck. Figures, no? [Hat tip Sridhar Parthasarathy in email]

Great read: ‘I will not read your fucking script’ — featuring History of Violence writer Josh Olson [Link courtesy Raja Sen]

Back in the day, Manu Joseph had done an impressionistic piece on Anand Jon [linked to in this post] for ToI. He now reprises it, against the frame of Chennai’s college sexuality, for Open magazine.

And the final link for the week: roflmao. Reminds me of the time I told the partner [mine, not Amit’s] that if a person can rattle off at the rate of knots without saying anything in particular, people will take him for an expert on art. Show me, goes the partner. So we wandered into this gallery, and walked around, and I stood in front of a particularly pointless daub and began throwing words together as they came to me: “That red dot in the middle of the large swathe of yellow? It particularly speaks to me — brilliant artistic riff on the human nature. We are all like that — we live our lives in a state of perennial cowardice but somewhere, deep inside, the small spark of anger, of rebellion and revolt, burns deep….” You know — that kind of thing, non-stop. And then I get this nudge and I look around, and I find an audience, half a dozen people nodding on with my every word. Hmph!

Public utility

Here’s a website [related story] that tells movie-goers when it’s safe to go take a leak without the fear of missing much [some bloke who came near busting his bladder one time must have dreamt this one up]. Now someone please come up with a site that tells you when it’s safe to come out of the toilet and actually watch. [Tangentially, isn’t this carrying environmental concern one drop too far?]