Srinagar streets were swarming with police and paramilitary men at dusk on Thursday, as barricades and barbed wire obstacles came up
to prevent a surge of people taking over the city on Friday.
Paramilitary men, most of them masked in black, had been deployed on key crossings and thoroughfares, as a prelude to the strict restrictions, the government’s euphemism for undeclared curfew, sure to be clamped on Srinagar, and most probably in other districts also, tomorrow.
On Thursday, a heavy deployment of the police and the paramilitary forces had kept a severe check on civilian movement in several old city areas, while the commercial hub of Srinagar remained totally shuttered along with the other main business centers of the valley.
Private vehicles plied without let or hindrance in city areas free of restrictions, while the uptown Rambagh quarter was rocked with violence once again as the forces went into action against stone-pelting protestors.
Almost all districts witnessed a shut down of commercial activity, government offices, schools and public transport, though the impact was reported to have been partial in Budgam.
This was the 28th time since unrest flared up at civilian killings in June that the valley was brought to a standstill either by hartal or by curfew in response to the Hurriyat (G)’s ongoing “Quit Kashmir” campaign.
In the Baramulla town of north Kashmir, angry crowds blocked the railway track and disrupted rail traffic, the first such hold-up caused by protestors in Kashmir.
Reports said that the crowds used an electricity pole across the track to halt the movement of the daily train running between north and south Kashmir.
Parts of the old town and the Azad Gunj and Cement Bridge localities witnessed clashes between protestors and the government forces after people tried to take out processions, but the violence crowds were broken up with cane charges and tear gas, leading to injures to half-a-dozen people, one them struck in the leg by a smoke shell.
Angry crowds attacked a government school in Bagh Mahtab on the outskirts of Srinagar after it was found to be functioning in the morning.
Several school-kids fainted due to the furious stone-pelting, and one girl, Urooj, a student of class 8, had to be rushed to a nearby hospital unconscious.
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