SRINAGAR: Sick and ailing Kashmiris face the brunt of India’s communications blackout prevailing for the last about 7 months, India’s lockdown on Kashmir has ensured a lack of information coming out of the valley, but the brunt of it is being borne by the doctors and patients as they struggle to get the necessary medical help.
Sanaullah Dar was due to undergo surgery to remove a tumour in his bladder. Four months later, he was dead, with doctors blaming a lockdown imposed by New Delhi on the restive part of Kashmir it controls.
In August, India’s Hindu-nationalist government stripped the Himalayan region of its semi-autonomous status and imposed restrictions on movement and a communications blackout, virtually cutting it off from the outside world.
Life for Kashmir’s seven-million inhabitants came to a standstill, including for doctors and patients who rely heavily on the internet to consult specialists outside the region, communicate with patients and order vital medicine.
“To get appropriate healthcare for patients like my father is difficult anyway,” Dar’s 20-year-old daughter, Sumaya, told medua.
The lockdown and blackout “made it impossible” for the family to schedule the surgery Dar urgently needed in Mumbai, 2,000 kilometres away.
By the time the family was able to get him to a hospital in Delhi in late October, it was too late. Dar passed away a week after he returned home.
Omar, an oncologist who treated Dar in Kashmir and who only wanted to give his first name, said the surgery “probably would have been able to save” Dar if it had gone ahead as scheduled.
Dar was not his only patient to die due to the lack of timely specialist treatment, he said, adding he had heard of other deaths from other doctors’ patients.
India is the world leader in cutting internet services, activists say, and access was also temporarily suspended in other parts of the country during recent protests against a new citizenship law.
India alleges that the communication blackout was necessary to ‘restrict communications’ of alleged militants which officials claim are supported by Pakistan.
However, Pakistan has strongly denied the accusation, and Islamabad has repeatedly pointed out that India deflects anything happening in Kashmir with a vague accusation of Pakistani involvement in what has turned into an indigenous movement for freedom.
Mobile phone coverage has slowly been restored in Kashmir, and restrictions on movement relaxed.
Internet access was partially restored in late January, but users can only access government-approved websites that include international news publications and platforms such as Netflix and Amazon.
Mobile phone data, however, is still limited to slower second-generation (2G) connections — of little use for doctors trying to conduct remote consultations.
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