NEW DELHI: A programme that was scheduled to be held on Wednesday in the national capital on the topic ‘Media blackout in Kashmir’ was not allowed by the police, citing the possibility of law and order disturbance.
The programme was scheduled at 2 pm at Gandhi Peace Foundation located in the ITO area of the city.
A Delhi Police official, in a notice to the organisers of the event, said that they had received information that some ‘anonymous’ group is organising a public meeting on ‘Media Blackout in Kashmir’.
“Efforts to get details of members of the anonymous group have been made but the same could not be verified. There is a discrete input of disturbance in law and order situation in view of organising this public meeting,” the Station-House Officer of the IP Estate police station said in the notice and further requested the organisers to cancel the programme.
Sharply reacting over the denial by the police to hold the event, one of the speakers at the event, Nandita Narain, said this outrageous cancellation at the last minute only serves to reinforce the widely known fact about the suppression of free speech, not only in Kashmir but all over India, including in its capital Delhi.
Narain said the police had even tried the same thing with the Bharat Bachao programme, but the organisers managed to get a court order allowing the programme to be held.
Filmmaker Sanjay Kak termed the move as a ‘throttling of democracy’. “It is out of such authoritarian steps that the abhorrent silence around the situation in Kashmir has been constructed. It’s important for people to take note that this silencing does not – and will not – stop at discussions of Kashmir alone,” he said.