Clicking on the link to an article in the English-language daily Greater Kashmir about the 2010 murder of 16-year-old Ishtiyaq Ahmad Khanday now leads to a page "Error 404...."

Same for that of Kashmir Reader, another English-language daily evoking Sajad Ahmad Dar, who died in hospital after being taken into police custody in 2012: "Sorry, the page you are looking for is not here."

Ditto for the MyKashmir.in information portal relating the case of Ghulam Mohi-ud-Din Malik, a 38-year-old carpenter, who was shot 19 times when his home was searched in 2009 by paramilitaries: "Forbidden. You cannot do not have permission to access this resource."

“How and why the archives disappeared remains very mysterious,” Anuradha Bhasin, editor-in-chief of the influential Kashmir Times daily, told AFP, whose “suspicions” lie with the Indian state.

The offices of the independent English-language newspaper Kashmir Observer, on January 29 in Srinagar, Indian Kashmir Tauseef MUSTAFA AFP

Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan, which have claimed this Muslim-majority Himalayan territory since their independence in 1947.

The Indian-administered part has seen decades of unrest that has claimed tens of thousands of lives since an insurgency began in 1989. Delhi accuses Pakistan of supporting separatists, which Islamabad denies.

Tensions escalated with the revocation in August 2019 of the partial autonomy of Indian Kashmir to place it under the direct control of the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Thousands of people, including political leaders and activists, were arrested, telephone and internet communications cut off, isolating the territory for almost six months.

Once communications were restored, journalists found that many stories had disappeared from their newspaper sites.

The editor-in-chief of a publication in Srinagar, the main city of Indian Kashmir, told AFP that he first thought it was a technical problem.

Removal of metadata

"But after taking a closer look at our online archives, we realized what was missing mostly covered the years of insurrection and killings 'to the point of feeling' that nothing had happened in Kashmir before. 2019,” he explains.

A man consults the website of the independent newspaper Kashmir Observer on his phone on January 29, 2022 in Srinagar, Indian Kashmir.

In recent months, numerous articles critical of the repression carried out by the security forces have mysteriously disappeared from the archives of the newspapers Tauseef MUSTAFA AFP

India's government spokesman in Srinagar did not respond to AFP requests for comment on the matter.

Most of the missing information relates to major protests against Indian rule in 2008, 2010 and 2016, in which a total of nearly 300 protesters were killed by government forces and thousands injured, including women and children. .

Historian Siddiq Wahid, vice-chancellor and founder of the Islamic University of Science and Technology in Pulwama, sees it as a "diabolical" attempt to give "a single interpretation" of events.

"It's an extraordinary effort to seize the narrative" and leave room only for "the official story, he told AFP, "the surveillance described by (George) Orwell in (his novel) +1984 + seems crude and rustic compared to what is happening today."

Several media professionals, speaking on condition of anonymity, claimed that the authorities had pressured their publications to hide from their archives articles relating to murders, rapes, torture and other abuses attributed to Indian security forces by human rights organizations and rejected by New Delhi.

A website manager working for several newspapers says he has been approached by counter-insurgency police on several occasions to provide him with technical information.

The closed doors at the Independent Press Club in Srinagar, Indian Kashmir on January 18, 2022 Tauseef MUSTAFA AFP/Archives

The editor of another Srinagar newspaper says news publishers were forced by authorities to remove metadata from some sensitive articles that appeared online to prevent the public from accessing them.

Metadata is used to classify digital content so that search engines offer relevant results.

Removing metadata from archived content makes it almost impossible to access specific events, the site manager told AFP.

“Even if all the archives remain there, it is now impossible to find them using keywords, unless you remember the sequence of the exact words of a long paragraph,” he explains.

Cyber ​​attacks

The work of researchers, journalists, historians, organizations for the defense of rights is hampered and the public deprived of its only sources of information.

The Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, a rights organization which published the "Alleged Perpetrators" report in 2012, refused AFP's requests to discuss this subject.

Its activities have come to a virtual standstill since its program coordinator was arrested in November and its electronic records, among other data, seized by India's National Intelligence Agency.

According to local journalists, this is not the first time that the independent press has been the victim of sabotage.

The Kashmir Times website has been hacked several times and lost hundreds of reports critical of the actions of the security forces, says its editor.

That of the daily Kashmir Observer was the victim of cyber-attacks during periods of major demonstrations scrutinized by international opinion, recalls Sajjad Hyder, the editor-in-chief.

In 2018, after losing three to four years of data, the newspaper upgraded to a more secure server and firewalls.

He tries to fill the gaps in his archives by reproducing the printed articles.

But his site is subject to unexplained restrictions on social networks.

Its accessibility is random.

"Attempts are being made to minimize our reach and restrict our readership," Hyder said, "that's a big challenge."

Indian-administered Kashmir once had a vibrant press, with more than 250 newspapers, but faced decades of pressure from separatists and government agencies.

Since the revocation of its partial autonomy, editors say they have been under systematic pressure to tone down criticism from Indian authorities.

Journalists have been arrested under anti-terrorism laws or repeatedly summoned by police to be questioned about their reporting.

In December, authorities shut down the Kashmir Independent Press Club, which had criticized police harassment.

The disappearance of the archives seems "to be part of a constant effort by New Delhi to control the narrative on Kashmir", told AFP Michael Kugelman, expert on the region at the American think tank Wilson Center, in Washington.

© 2022 AFP