By Jason Ditz
Treating their revocation of Kashmiri autonomy as a fait accompli, the Indian government had begun to dial back the restrictions on movement Kashmir. That didn’t last long, however, and India is now moving to reimpose all of those same restrictions.
Indian officials say this is because of a growing crisis involving growing protests throwing stones at security forces. They accused 47 stones of having been thrown on Saturday, and 20 more on Sunday before restrictions started being put back in place.
And restrictions, of course, mean Indian police firing pellet guns at anybody caught out in public in Srinagar, and mass arrests of anyone suspected of wrongdoing. Some 4,000 people have been arrested and held without charges.
The mass arrests are likely to be a long term problem in Kashmir, as Indian law allows such detainees to be held without trial for as much as two years. Indeed, judges are ordering many detainees to be removed from Kashmir on the grounds that all the jails in Kashmir are already totally full.
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