“It is part of a larger crackdown and criminalizing of opinions.”

No internet until Christmas

In the November 29th newsletter, I covered the extension of the Indian government’s ban on internet services in Indian-administered Kashmir until the 11th of December 2020. Earlier this week, however, the Indian government extended the internet shutdown until the 25th of December 2020, making sure that Kashmiris “continue to be left in the dark, now until at least Christmas”, as Access Now tweeted about the government order.

According to the government order, and as before, the justification behind the extension was,

due to likelihood of misuse of the data services (sic) by the anti national elements (sic) to disrupt the democratic process by creating a scare among the voters, carrying out attacks on security forces, targetting of contesting candidates and the workers.”

(note: “voters” and “contesting candidates” are in reference to District Development Council elections currently underway in Indian-administered Kashmir)

According to the order,

“there have been continuous attempts to radicalize the youth through multiple method (sic), most importantly through videos using social media, which rely on high speed internet for easy dissemination of such material.”

None of this will sound foreign to anyone familiar with the modus operandi of authoritarian governments, whether it’s India, China, Pakistan, Russia, etc, which is to crack down on forms of media on the grounds of “national security”.

Plus ça change.

Given the Indian government’s ongoing throttling of the internet in Kashmir, there are grounds to be sceptical about the ban even ending after Christmas. I would make a dark joke about Scrooge or the Grinch, but last time I checked neither of those two used pellet guns to blind or even kill civilians. Or tortured people, as we will see below.

Police brutality over social media

Aakash Hassan’s article for The Intercept last weekend focused on Kashmiri social media users being beaten up and interrogated by police in Indian-administered Kashmir for what they post online makes for harrowing reading, and puts government actions such as the order above in much harsher light. Based in Indian-administered Kashmir himself, Aakash Hassan’s report is harrowing, and it’s noting that to digital activists in South Asia, some of the actions and steps taken by the Indian government and security forces in the occupied territory echo moves that other nations - such as Pakistan, are thinking of as well.

Hassan recounts accounts by journalists, activists and ordinary citizens - angry with the authorities and what they regard as media silence on human rights abuses in Indian-administered Kashmir - of being summoned by the police without reason, only to be taken to a notorious torture complex known as the Cage, and then made to hand over their phones and social media login information, sometimes after severe beatings and threats of death or jail.

According to the article,

After spending more than three hours in the holding room, getting fingerprinted and photographed, and handing over his banking information and other personal details, Ahmed was taken to an interrogation room where several officers were waiting for him. “They yelled and shouted, ‘Who is giving you money to post all this?’” he said. “One officer slapped and kicked me.” One of the officers pushed a file toward him containing screenshots of his posts from Twitter.

“I was asked to unlock my phone and one officer started scanning it,” Ahmed said. “Another officer asked for the passwords of my email and social media accounts.” The officers pulled up Ahmed’s Twitter account on a desktop computer and started questioning him about his more recent tweets.

The mother and siblings of another person, Bilal, were (verbally) abused by police (after they confiscated his phone and went through personal family photos) “and threatened that they will also be treated like me.”

The article also recounts how Tahir Ashraf Bhatti, the head of Indian-administered Kashmir’s high-powered cybercrimes division, which has been given broad powers - has himself been accused of brutality, with The Intercept being told by the victim that,

he was summoned to the cyber police station in August after he had mocked Bhatti on Twitter. He was taken to Cargo where Bhatti used a leather belt to beat him repeatedly for three days on the same part of his body. “If I tell you the spot they hit, they would get to know my identity,” he said. Bhatti denied this incident took place.

Bhatti, for his part, claims that people were being called in by the police for “cyberbullying” and fraud - which are both suspect. Bilal (whose family was threatened), for example, was told that he should act as an informer, or else made to die in a “police encounter” (or “staged gunfight” as Hassan writes). he was let off with a warning in this instance, but threatened with being charged under India’s draconian and notorious Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, an overly broad bit of ostensibly anti-terrorism legislation - not exactly what you’d throw at your ordinary criminal. As a September 2020 article on the UAPA points out, it is used by “the government uses it to detain people who are a political threat or dissenting”, and has been used against against a photojournalist for accurately captioning an image being held by mourners.

Hassan’s article also cites an August 2020 report by the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, Kashmir’s Internet Siege, which looked at the extent of censorship and surveillance carried out by the Indian government, including bans on VPN services (which were “propagating rumours, secessionist ideology and glorifying terror acts/terrorists” according to security forces). He also quotes Devdutta Mukhopadhyay of India’s Internet Freedom Foundation, who mentioned that “some examples we have seen in the past year are WhatsApp group administrators being made to register with district authorities” in addition to bans on VPNs.

Even when VPNs are being used, however, police are reportedly able to track down people within minutes, according to Bhatti. “That team is composed of 40 tech-savvy cops, Bhatti said” according to the article, “while the more challenging cases are outsourced to private companies, which he did not specify.”

The use of private-sector companies to hack the social media or devices of people is alas exceedingly common - as this 2015 report by The Verge on the digital surveillance via spyware on the devices of Bahraini activist Moosa Abd-Ali Ali, which nearly got him killed - and that police in Indian-administered Kashmir are able to afford to do so possibly speaks to the funding and support that is being provided by the Indian government.

As the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society wrote in their report,

The siege serves as a deliberate means of severing social, economic and political connections between Kashmiris, while also isolating them from the world. For the already vulnerable people of Jammu & Kashmir, who live amidst a state of perpetual war and permanent emergency, it enacts a ‘digital apartheid’, a form of systemic and pervasive discriminatory treatment and collective punishment.

The security forces, on behalf of the Indian government, function as its overpowered militant arm, actively enforcing crackdowns and beatings in the manner of Judge Dredd. And as Aakash Hassan writes, many of those that have been summoned by the police - men and women, mostly students - have either since gone offline or stopped posting about Kashmir, to avoid being attacked again. Police states are effective when they have the muscle to back up censorship with proactive surveillance and beatings.