Communication blockade hits funeral attendance in Kashmir

Samaan Lateef

Tribune News Service

Srinagar September 14

For two d4ays, 45-year-old Nusrat Jabeen of south Kashmir’s Shopian district had no clue about her father’s death in Srinagar.

It was only after a relative dropped at her home, around 60 km south of Srinagar, that she came to know about Abdul Rahman’s death.

Rahman, 75, died in a road accident near his house at Nowgam locality in the outskirts of Srinagar on August 24. He was hit by a truck and left on road unattended for half-an-hour until he bled to death. He was declared brought dead at the Shri Maharaja Hari Singh (SMHS) Hospital in Srinagar.

Due to communication blockade, a majority of people in the Valley don’t get to know about the death of their loved ones.

“She (Jabeen) came crying, pulling her hair and beating her chest. She hit her head on the grave of her father until she fell unconscious. We could only watch her helplessly,” said Jabeen’s brother Asif Wani.

Jabeen said she was planning to see her father in the first week of September. “I could not even see him dead and this will haunt me for the entire life,” Jabeen laments.

Jabeen is one of many such cases from Kashmir where people did not get to know about the death of their loved ones or could not reach to attend their funerals due to restriction on public movement. Since August 5, the attendance in the funerals has thinned, as only members of the immediate family and neighbours are able to attend the mourning.

Women married out of the native towns of their parents are the worst hit.

Peerzada Mahboobul Haq, an academician in the United States, could manage to call home after two weeks of lockdown. Little did Haq know that his grandfather had died. “After two weeks I somehow managed to call my parents. Little did I know that I would end up hearing that my grandfather has left for his heavenly abode,” Haq wrote on a social networking site.

Shamima Hafeez (name changed), 68, mother of a senior bureaucrat of Old City, Srinagar, died of heart attack in the last week of August.

Shamima’s son delayed her funeral to wait for the attendance of her relatives. After several hours of wait, only a few people turned up to attend her last rites.