India cuts internet and mobile phone service in Kashmir after separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Gilani dies - The Washington Post

NEW DELHI — Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a leader of Kashmir’s separatist movement who vexed the New Delhi government for decades with his uncompromising politics, died Wednesday night, prompting Indian authorities to deploy troops around the restive region and cut Internet access.

Geelani, who had been struggling with kidney disease and dementia, died at his home in Srinagar, where he had been under house arrest for years, said his son Naseem Geelani and Syed Omar, a family caretaker. He was 91.

After word of Geelani’s death spread, local police sealed his street and whisked away his body in the early hours of Thursday morning. Geelani was not permitted to be buried at the martyr’s graveyard, but was hastily interred at a local cemetery before sunrise and under close police watch, according to the family.

By early Thursday, rows of local shops remained closed on city streets patrolled by paramilitary troops, while cellphone service and roads between cities were cut off to private cars, according to local residents. Indian authorities often cut Internet access in Kashmir to forestall public unrest.

The sensitivity around Geelani’s death reflects the enduring tensions in Indian-administered Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region that has bristled under New Delhi’s rule and lies at the heart of the explosive territorial dispute between India and Pakistan that has been unresolved since the 1947 Partition of India. Both countries control parts of the region but claim its entirety, and they have fought two wars and countless other proxy battles over it.

Geelani, who favored Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan, became the face of secessionists, especially in the latter decades of his life. He led vast strikes and shutdowns that forced the region to a standstill and led protests against the Indian military presence and their alleged crimes against local civilians.

Revered in Kashmir, supported in Pakistan and reviled in India, he was elected to India’s parliament in 1972, 1977 and 1987, served lengthy prison sentences and was charged with nearly 60 counts of political crimes over five decades in politics.

In the 1990s, as Kashmir became gripped by violent insurgency, Geelani helped found the Hurriyat Conference, an amalgamation of groups seeking autonomy in Kashmir. When the front’s more moderate leaders advocated dialogue with the New Delhi government, he splintered off and continued to advocate a rigid stance that garnered adulation from a younger generation of Kashmiris but flustered his more pragmatic peers.

In 2001, Geelani was a rare public voice who objected to a proposal made by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to withdraw both Indian and Pakistani troops from Kashmir and loosen border controls. The attempt at a peace deal won approval from many Kashmiri leaders but not Geelani, who denounced it as a diplomatic “trick” between two countries. The proposal ultimately fell apart.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan announced Pakistan would observe a day of mourning. “We in Pakistan salute his courageous struggle and remember his words: ‘Hum Pakistani hain aur Pakistan Humara hai,’ ” Khan said Thursday on Twitter. The quote translates to: “We are Pakistani and Pakistan is ours.”

Meanwhile in Indian-administered Kashmir, the region’s police chief, Vijay Kumar, urged Geelani’s supporters to refrain from gathering at his home and said the Internet would be cut and a curfew enforced. Local media organizations were also forbidden from publishing, said Tahir Bhat, an editor at Kashmir Life. Bashir Ahmad, a public school teacher in Kupwara near the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistani-administered Kashmir, said police on the Indian side were not allowing cars to enter towns.

When reached by telephone on Thursday, Naseem Geelani, 52, said the police had pushed the family to bury his father before dawn to prevent a breakdown in law and order. “It was not an honorable way to treat him,” said Geelani, a professor in Srinagar who has been repeatedly probed by Indian investigators for suspected ties to Pakistan-based terrorist groups but never charged.

Indian officials fear Geelani’s death could provoke a response similar to that of Burhan Wani, a militant leader — and social media star — whose death in a July 2016 gunfight with Indian troops sparked a wave of violent protests across Kashmir that led to dozens of deaths and did not subside for months. Geelani was under house arrest during those months but continued to rally supporters by phone.

India shuts down Internet access in the name of public security more often than any other country in the world. In 2020, India accounted for 155 instances of intentional Internet disruptions, followed by Yemen, at six, according to the digital rights group Access Now.

Kashmir was again put under a lengthy lockdown without Internet access in 2019, when the Indian parliament revoked the region’s long-standing semiautonomous status in a move that Indian officials said would bring greater stability and integration with the rest of the country.

Zafar Aafaq and Niha Masih in New Delhi, and Shams Irfan in Srinagar contributed to this report.

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