Past an edgy Friday, Valley heads to unsure future

It was an eerily silent Friday. Police and paramilitary personnel had sealed off neighbourhoods and were manning flashpoint locations as they imposed a crippling curfew across the Kashmir valley.
Friday was a decisive point in the ongoing unrest that has paralysed the region for the past week and has shown no sign of an end as uncertainty cloaks every new day.
The communication network in the region remained grounded as the state administration went into an overdrive to prevent the situation from going out of control. The state-owned telecom company which is widely used by government officials remained the only active communication network.
The unrest in the Kashmir valley, that was triggered last week by the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani, has led to killing of at least 36 civilians in police action. It has also caused an unpleasant diplomatic exchange between New Delhi and Islamabad as Pakistan took a belligerent position with its Prime Minister and Army chief issuing strong-worded statements.
In the Kashmir valley, anger has mounted over the past week as death toll reached 36 and several hundred were injured, with many of them with bullet injuries and in a critical condition. The region has remained completely shut, with all its markets closed, for seven consecutive days since protests first erupted on Friday night, almost immediately after Wani’s killing in a gunfight.
At midday on Friday, calls for congregational prayer blaring from hundreds of mosques, echoed through Srinagar city and marked the beginning of tense hours for the police and paramilitary personnel.
A resident of Habba Kadal, a locality on edge of Srinagar’s old city, said a strict curfew was in place and no one was being allowed to move out of their houses. “It is difficult for situation to return to normal, so many people have died,” he said.
At the city’s Shri Maharajah Hari Singh hospital which was overwhelmed by the injured and wounded patients in the first three days, doctors said very few injured patients had come in past two days – an indicator of the situation improving. In the afternoon, an ominous siren of an ambulance ended the lull.
The civilians wounded in a firing incident in Sopore sub-district were the first new injuries of the day and the sign of a situation that was increasingly volatile, fluid and unpredictable.