66th day of lockdown: Colleges reopen in IHK but students stay away

[ahlam1399]

SRINAGAR: The efforts of the Jammu and Kashmir administration to reopen colleges in the Valley on Wednesday failed as students did not report to classwork, on the 66th consecutive day since the abrogation of the state’s special status under Article 370 on August 5.Divisional Commissioner Kashmir Baseer Khan last week announced that the schools would reopen on October 3 and the colleges on October 9 in Kashmir.The staff reported for work at the colleges but the students stayed away, officials said.Students also have not attended schools despite the administration’s several attempts.The parents are reluctant to send their children to schools or colleges as they fear for their safety amid the shutdown and communication blackout in most parts of the valley.On Wednesday, normal life continued to remain disrupted across Kashmir.To register their protest against the abrogation of the special status of the state, shopkeepers open their shops early in the morning till around 11.00am and then down the shutters.The shutdown has come as boon for the roadside vendors, who have been regularly setting up their stalls along the Residency Road and around the Polo View area of the city, witnessing a brisk footfall of customers.The mobile telephone services in most parts of Kashmir and all internet services continue to remain suspended since August 5.Most of the top level and second rung separatist politicians have been taken into preventive custody while mainstream leaders including two former chief ministers — Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti — have been either detained or placed under house arrest.Another former chief minister and Lok Sabha MP from Srinagar Farooq Abdullah has been arrested under the controversial Public Safety act, a law enacted by his father and National Conference founder Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah in 1978 when he was the chief minister.Meanwhile, Pakistan on Tuesday drew attention to the “grim reality” facing children in Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK), which is under a repressive lockdown for over two months now and fervently called on the world community and the UNICEF, the UN's children agency, to come to their aid."It is time for the international community to act, by demanding that India fulfill its obligations, including to protect and safeguard children, in the occupied territory," Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi told the General Assembly's Third Committee, which deals with social, humanitarian and cultural matters.Speaking in a debate on the promotion and protection of the rights of children, the Pakistan envoy said, “It was also time for UNICEF to speak up and to live up to its responsibility and come to the aid of children who are incarcerated or suffer in curfew-bound occupied Kashmir. "After all," she added, "when the lives and rights of children are at stake, there must be no silent witnesses; silence means complicity."In her remarks, Ambassador Lodhi said that children were worst affected by armed conflicts, foreign occupation, and humanitarian crises. "Nowhere is this grim reality more stark than in occupied Jammu and Kashmir," she said, adding that since India's "illegal" annexation of occupied Kashmir on Aug. 5, a large number of children have been picked up in night-time raids."Two months on, harrowing and spine-chilling stories abound of widespread torture and arbitrary arrests; of how thousands including children have been picked up from their homes by occupation forces in the still of the night – taken away without any trace.," Ambassador Lodhi said, and quoted one mother from Baramulla as saying, “Nights fill us with dread”."Innocent Kashmiri children and youth, like 16 year old Asrar Khan, who succumbed to pellet gun injuries and tear gas shells last month; or 18 month old Hiba Jan, blinded by a pellet gun in 2018, are victims of an illegal occupation," she said. "These tell unremitting tales of an occupation force, which has no regard for the norms of international law or respect for the rights of children." "For Kashmiri people," Ambassador Lodhi said, "life under this brutal occupation is to live in an armed cage in the silence of a graveyard."Noting that the recommendations of two reports by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights were yet to be implemented, the Pakistani envoy said it was time for the bloodletting of innocent Kashmiris, including Kashmiri children, to stop.As far as Pakistan was concerned, Ambassador Lodhi said that the country was committed to promoting and protecting the rights of all children at home and abroad. "For the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan, children are not only repositories of our greatest hopes and aspirations; they are also the cornerstone of the government’s people-centric policies of sustainable and inclusive development, and charting a pathway to provide a 'better tomorrow' to our children and future generations," she added.Ambassador Lodhi also recalled that she had the privilege of co-facilitating the modalities resolution on commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child during the last session of the General Assembly. That too was acknowledgement of the priority her country accorded to the rights of children.http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/com/cwEr/~4/sTr6naz3qAQ

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