Unable to get medial help, Kashmiri dying as lockdown continues: Report

NEW YORK, Oct 07 (APP):A leading American newspaper Monday carried heart-rending accounts of people dying because they could not get medical help in Indian Occupied Kashmir, which is under tight curfew since August 5 when New Delhi annexed the disputed state.

“Two months after the Indian government revoked Kashmir’s autonomy and imposed harsh security measures across the Kashmir Valley, doctors and patients here say the crackdown has taken many lives, in large part because of a government-imposed communication blackout, including shutting down the internet,” The New York Times said in a dispatch from Heevan village.

Here is how the dispatch begins: “Saja Begum was cooking dinner when her son walked into the kitchen with a stricken look on his face. ‘Mom,’ he said. ‘I have been bitten by a snake. I am going to die.’

“Saja Begum could not call an ambulance: The Indian government had shut down Kashmir’s cellular network. She then began a panicked, 16-hour odyssey to find an antidote that could save her 22-year-old son.

“While his leg began to swell and he grew faint, she trekked across a landscape of cutoff streets, security checkpoints, disconnected phones and hobbled doctors…

“For Saja Begum’s family, time had become the enemy.

“On Aug. 13, her son, Amir Farooq Dar, a student whose college has been closed since early August, was tending his family’s sheep in an orchard near the town of Baramulla when he was bitten by a krait, a poisonous snake.

“Most bites are fatal unless Polyvalent, an antivenin medication, is injected in the first six hours. Ms. Begum cinched a rope around his leg, hoping it would slow the poison. She then ran, with her son leaning against her, to the village public health center, which usually stocks the antidote. The center was closed.