'Publishing passages from a modern classic in a newspaper seemed criminal at a time when the people of Kashmir needed views about a catastrophic situation that had befallen them. The edit page had been comprehensively depoliticised.'
In September, there appeared in Kashmir’s largest circulated English daily, Greater Kashmir, a passage from Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which occupied about three-quarters of the editorial page. An essay on another of his masterpieces, The Trial, filled the rest of the page. A newspaper dedicating an entire page to the works of a dead European writer resulted in two sets of opinions in the local media circles.
The space Kafka’s immortal works dominated that day had been the domain of newspaper’s regular columnists, many of whom had been first asked to soften their writings and then told to stop writing altogether in the run up to August 5, when Kashmir was stripped of its autonomy and “fully merged” into the Indian Union with sheer military might.
“I told him I would prefer to not write than modulate my writing to the whims and tastes of the regime,” H toldat a restaurant in one of India-held Kashmir's rural towns. He was reluctant to speak on the phone and requested I drive down to his hometown, about 80 kilometres from Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital. He spends his time reading and tending to a recently groomed plot of farmland.
Lately, his columns were being found “Kashmir-heavy”, even the one on the cultural history of the place. In March, he was told to stop writing for the newspaper. Only a miniscule number of regular columnists in Greater Kashmir had been professional journalists. The majority comprised retired or in-service government officials and academics, whose association with the state by default worked as a moderating factor even though some had been bitterly critical of its oppressive policies. The journalistic grapevine always cribbed about the quality of the opinion pieces in the newspaper.
“Watching this unfold before your eyes feels like watching somebody getting killed before your eyes,” said S.
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