“Harassed and briefly detained.” Journalist Aakash Hassan told Brut India about the problems he faced in covering the Kashmir lockdown.
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00:00The biggest challenge I faced in reporting Kashmir was the movement from one place to
00:21another place and the communication.
00:25I got the restrictions passed from administration but after two days that was torn apart by
00:31CRPF personnel, furious CRPF personnel.
00:35They went through my notes, they even after finding the details I had taken from the locals,
00:42they subjected me to like harassment.
00:58I was on my way to Shobyan and I had clicked some photographs of forces personnel checking
01:04vehicles at a check post and after four or five days I happened to visit an area in North
01:13Kashmir and again a police personnel, he checks my phone, he asks me to unlock my phone and
01:20goes through photographs and the notes.
01:22Then he asks me that you have taken the photograph the previous day, the other day.
01:28He asks me for whom I have taken the permission.
01:33On one day I left Srinagar to report in North Kashmir area and I was at a check point, I
01:40was detained just because I was talking to someone, I was talking to locals.
01:46There was a lot of questioning on why I have taken notes, why I have written what people
01:51have alleged against police and the forces.
01:54All my notes were deleted, the photographs I had taken were deleted.
01:59The police was also going, they were also trying to delete all the data from my phone.
02:04It was after like many hours that I was let go, that too after a lot of questioning and
02:11what I would say was completely harassment.
02:29The biggest challenge we face is how we file the stories, how we file the data to our offices,
02:39how we file the information.
02:41Our mind remains always occupied with this that we have to reach a particular place that's
02:46called media facilitation centre equipped with four computers and mobile phone.
02:52Entire journalist fraternity, around 200 journalists, sometimes more than that, in Kashmir rely
02:59on those four computers.
03:01It's not only the difficulty in how much time it's consuming, it's also about our privacy.
03:07You're using public computers and your passwords, your emails are in the public domain, I believe.