“It won’t stop at Kashmir,” says a senior editor on a key news site being blocked by Modi's government.
Source: Reuters Institute
Por Raksha Kumar
The issue. On 19 August independent news site The Kashmir Walla issued a statement saying the government of India had blocked its website. When contacting its online server provider, the newsroom found out that the blocking had been ordered by India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under the 2000 Information Technology Act. The law was also used to block the site’s accounts on Facebook and Twitter. The context. In 2019, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi brought Kashmir under the direct control of the Indian government. Kashmir, which is India’s only Muslim majority region, has been in a 30-year long conflict with the Indian State and until then had enjoyed partial autonomy. Modi flooded the streets with troops and blocked the internet for several months. Since then, he has tried to control the news media in different ways, as we reported last year in this piece. The interview. One of the most high-profile media managers in Kashmir is Anuradha Bhasin, the executive editor of the Kashmir Times, one of the oldest English dailies in the region. Bhasin, who has just started a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University, spoke with our contributor Raksha Kumar about The Kashmir Walla’s blockage and the future of independent news media in the region.
