Press freedom chilled in Kashmir as reporting is ‘criminalized’ – By Nusrat Sidiq (NBC News) / June 26, 2022
Journalists in the disputed Indian territory say they face an atmosphere of intimidation that is hampering their work or driving them out of the profession altogether.
SRINAGAR, India — Working as a journalist in Kashmir, a disputed mountainous region split mainly between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, has never been easy.
As a photojournalist, Muneeb-ul-Islam says, he has been beaten by demonstrators and security forces alike while covering protests in Indian-administered Kashmir, the site of a decadeslong insurgency against New Delhi’s rule. But he was not deterred from the work that he considered his calling.
That changed in 2019, when India’s Hindu nationalist government revoked the limited autonomy that Kashmir had enjoyed for 70 years and began a harsh crackdown. Since then, Islam and others say, journalists in Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority region, have faced an atmosphere of intimidation that is driving many of them out of the profession and keeping others from freely reporting what’s happening there to the world.
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