In Violence Hit Valley, residents in endless Captivity

There have been fewer answers throughout the past 11 weeks of the unrest in the Kashmir region, which continues without any sign of an immediate end as residents wait endlessly in their houses as all commercial activity has come to a stop.
For 25-year-old Akhtar Ahmad, a bank employee, it has been curfew since July 8, even if it is imposed on the road, a kilometre away from his home on the city outskirts. “It is a long walk to the road to see whether there is curfew or not. Many times we don’t even know what is happening outside,” he said.
The evenings, when distant sounds of bursts of tear smoke shells are heard, are the indicator that the situation is edgy and dangerous even for a stroll.
For Shahid Aleem, a resident of Srinagar’s old city, which has remained under curfew or similar restrictions for much of the time in past 72 days, the life has been restricted to home or the narrow lanes of his neighbourhood.
He spends his days with the family, playing cricket with cousins and neighbours, or gossiping about the situation. “Everyone is puzzled about what will happen next,” he said. “I tried to borrow a book from a friend so I can read it at home, but there is no peace of mind to concentrate,” he said.
The Kashmir unrest began on July 8 evening when militant commander Burhan Wani was killed in a gun battle in a remote village of south Kashmir. His killing sparked protests across the region and led to shutdowns that have continued uninterruptedly since then.
Many residents have set their own deadlines for the unrest to near an end. These deadlines are markers of past unrests, when a significant climb down had taken place, and now only a few are left.
During the initial weeks of the unrest, some had mistakenly anticipated the protests to die down after August 15, Independence Day, which is ritualistically a shutdown day here. The next imagined deadline was Eid-ul-Azha, which was sombrely celebrated this week and also failed to make any climbdown.
The latest deadline is Darbar move, the biannual shifting of government’s base from Jammu to Srinagar in May and Srinagar to Jammu in late October. “It will continue till Darbar move,” Aleem, who works in the private sector, guessed.
Some, however, have set the late autumn apple and rice harvesting in villages as a critical milestone. “Much of it depends on how south and north Kashmir will behave,” said Sameer Ahmad, a shopkeeper, referring to the regions where horticulture and agriculture is the main economic activity. “If they go for harvesting and stop protests, it might end with that,” he said.