Srinagar: While cyber police officials claim that they have questioned a lot of youth in the past two weeks for “cyber bullying”, many political leaders and activists have accused the J&K administration of pushing youth to the wall and not allowing them even to write about their feelings on different social media platforms.
Cyber police have been questioning a lot of youths and many of them have deleted their accounts after “interaction with police, warning them not to repeat such offending comments anymore”. Reports said that in the recent past, cyber police of Srinagar have identified more than 300 accounts which were indulging in hate posts and “cyber bullying”.
SP Cyber Police who are heading the Srinagar operations told the media that they have been able to identify all such anti-social elements and all of them would be summoned for questioning and police will try to investigate the motivation behind such posts. According to police, many of them deactivated their accounts, but they were able to trace them and most of them would be questioned and even booked if found guilty for any charges under cyber laws.
Cyber police acted after receiving a lot of complaints from many people, including from political circles, complaining of targeted harassment and threats. Cyber police have decided to act as they fear that if such groups were allowed to operate on different social media platforms from Kashmir valley, it can be a threat to peace in future. While the police claimed that it was “coordinated online attack and not on political lines”, many political parties have said that most of the educated youth, including professionals, were forced to delete their accounts due to the coercion of cyber police. Prominent faces of the civil society of Kashmir, including Khurram Parvaiz, told the media that police at the instance of the government were trying to assert a particular brand of politics by force in Kashmir.
Iltija Mufti, who is handling the twitter account of her jailed mother Mehbooba Mufti, reacted to the cyber police action in a series of tweets and accused the Srinagar cyber police cell of forcing opinionated Kashmiri youths to delete their accounts on twitter. “Curious case of K twitter. Young, educated & opinionated Kashmiris on Twitter have suddenly disappeared from the platform. Apparently, most male users were summoned by the notorious Cyber Cell in Srinagar, forced to delete their accounts & sign ‘bonds’ promising ‘good behaviour’,” said one of the posts of Iltija Mufti on her mother’s account.
Cyber police chief of Srinagar has already told the media that all the allegations like that of “thought policing” of Kashmiri youth is baseless. In a series of tweets from Mehbooba Mufti’s account, Iltija Mufti said that basically the J&K administration was trying to assert the “fake narrative” of normalcy instead of accepting the ground realities of Kashmir. She claimed that cyber police have even called many women and they have even told them through their employers that they should delete the accounts or face the law. “Surely a cowardly tactic to blackmail women,” she said in one of the tweets.