Ever since the by-polls in Srinagar on 9th April, the Kashmir valley has been seeing a fresh spurt in violence. Owing to these violent protests, the government blocked access to mobile internet from 17th April with the view that rumors via inflammatory messages, especially on WhatsApp, could further escalate an already violent situation.
Now it appears that in an order dated 26th April, the J&K government has decided to block access to 16 social media sites for one month and has directed various ISPs to follow the directive. The sites which are blocked include are popular social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp.
This no-internet in Kashmir story has been extensively picked up by the media and it has prompted NDTV journalist Sunetra Choudhury to make a peculiar request.
She decided to request her Kashmiri friends and followers over the internet to send her 30 sec videos about what life is like without the internet:
https://twitter.com/sunetrac/status/857448604159557633
This request was odd considering how her followers who are without the internet would be able to log into Twitter (which is among the sites blocked) to check out her request and then after recording their videos about having no internet send them over to her via the internet.
This caught the eye of various Twitter users who decided to ‘troll’ her for her possibly naive request.
Here are a few:
https://twitter.com/UnSubtleDesi/status/857451793525100544
https://twitter.com/WoCharLog/status/857471510696652800
https://twitter.com/divya_16_/status/857457788338843648
https://twitter.com/vivekagnihotri/status/857459964880801794
https://twitter.com/_NAN_DINI/status/857459741089423360
https://twitter.com/muglikar_/status/857460065762258945
Her response to all the ‘trolling’ was even more amusing. She decided to send all those who engaged with her, a link to buy her book about VIP’s in prisons:
She also seems to have accepted that she was spamming everybody as a possible retribution to all the ‘trolling’:
https://twitter.com/sunetrac/status/857459869653139456
This does make one wonder as to was this tweet a deliberate attention seeking exercise so that she could promote her book?
Though she does seem to have acknowledged that she erred in putting out that tweet asking for videos, it isn’t clear if the admission was sarcastic:
https://twitter.com/sunetrac/status/857449768359829504
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsHaving said all that, the “life without internet” narrative in Kashmir is technically flawed considering that people in the valley can still access the internet via broadband services.