Umar Bashir
The state government’s decision to restrict civilian traffic on the highway for two days every week to facilitate movement of forces is an act aimed at worsening the life of the people, as state is already gripped with an extended sense of disaffection, separation resulting from hostility , varience and persecution, these measures will further exacerbate the situation.
The restrictions on civilian traffic on the 271-km-long highway will remain in force from 4am to 5pm and contains about 15000 vehicles including AMBULANCES ,SCHOOL BUSES that ply the HIGHWAY of the valley, but this announcement comes with big stick and will bustle the civil sections with severe pains in many forms and ways. The whole section of society will face hardships for some called few deemed elite . Due to the closure of artery highway the academic section will be badly hit to the extent that it will cause irreversible loss to students and lessening of the attainment of the quantity of education.
Banning civilians from a crucial highway in Kashmir is unjust, discriminatory, and reflects an apartheidist mindset among policymakers in Delhi.
This appears to be a tactic borrowed from the grotesque system of suppression and exclusion that Israel uses against Palestinians.
The highway goes through many towns and settlements in Kashmir, and is therefore essential for the local economy – a lifeline. To ban civilians from using it two days a week is just cruel.
Simply put, this is the conduct of an occupying military power. A decree that essentially means: we will use force to keep an entire population from using a lifeline route.
Halt in transport means a halt in mobility and non-earnings of these transporters during the Hartals resulted in the non-payment of loans to banks. Mechanical workshops, petrol pumps and service stations also got affected due to the halt in public transportation.
Pointing towards the inconvenience faced by people of Kashmir that at a time when the Kashmir Chamber has been raising the issue of lack of alternative routes and means of travel to Kashmir, the closure of the only available road link will put the whole population to unimaginable inconvenience and will have disastrous consequences for economy too.
The ban on civil traffic on the highway has thrown normal life out of gear in Kashmir, pains and snuffs the souls.
It is indeed a move full of disasters.
