India's crippling
10-day-old curfew in Kashmir will ease after Thursday, according to the
state governor, but phone lines and the internet will remain cut.
India
shut off communications and severely restricted movement in the part of
Kashmir it controls on August 4, a day before New Delhi stripped the
Muslim-majority region of its autonomy.
Fearing protests and unrest in the long-restive region,
tens of thousands of extra Indian troops have been deployed, turning the
picturesque main city of Srinagar into a warren of barbed wire and
barricades.
While rules on the movement of people would be eased
after India's Independence Day celebrations on Thursday, state governor
Satya Pal Malik said that phone lines and the internet would remain
down.
"We don't want to give that instrument to the enemy until
things settle down," Malik told the Times of India. "In a week or 10
days, everything will be alright and we will gradually open lines of
communication."
The lockdown has not completely prevented anger at Prime Minister Narendra Modi's move bursting out into the open, however.
According
to residents around 8,000 people protested after Friday prayers, with
security forces firing tear gas and pellet-firing shotguns to break up
the rally.
Only on Tuesday did the Indian government confirm that
clashes, blaming them on stone-throwing "miscreants" and saying its
forces reacted with "restraint".
Footage filmed by AFP on Monday
showed hundreds of people protesting in the Soura area of Srinagar,
shouting slogans such as "We want freedom" and "India go back" as
helicopters buzzed overhead.
"What India has done is unacceptable
to us. Our struggle will continue even if India keeps Kashmir locked
down for months," one protester told AFP.
- 'No bullets fired' -
India's home ministry said Tuesday that since the curfew was imposed, "no bullets have been fired".
But Munir Khan, a senior police officer in Kashmir, said that the military has used pellet-firing shotguns.
"There
have been 2-3 pellet injuries but they are nothing major. There is
nothing grave," Khan told AFP. He added that some security personnel
were also injured.
In Srinagar's main SMHS Hospital, one young man
was nursing his eye, saying he had been shot by pellets fired by
soldiers as he came out of a mosque on Monday.
"We could not pray
in peace on the day of Eid. A large number of soldiers surrounded the
mosque," a man by his bedside said, also declining to give his name.
Elsewhere
in the ward, six-year-old Munefa Nazir slept with her right eye
bandaged as her family took turns waving a handheld fan to keep her
cool.
According to her uncle, she was shot in the eye by a marble
fired from a catapult by an Indian soldier at a checkpoint as they rode
on his scooter on Monday evening.
"She screamed and blood from her
eye started oozing through her fingers as she covered her face with
both hands,” Farooq Ahmad said.
The 1,000-bed SMHS is usually busy
but because of the curfew only a few beds were occupied in some
sections. Many pharmacies have also run out of some supplies.
"We
have run out of a lot of prescription drugs people here look for," said
Mubashir Hussain, a salesman at a medical shop in the Jawahar Nagar area
where restrictions on public and vehicular movement have been eased
since Monday.
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