Saja Begum was cooking dinner when her son walked into the kitchen with a stricken look on his face. “Mom,” he said. “I have been bitten by a snake. I’m going to die.”
Begum could not call an ambulance: the government has shut down Kashmir’s cellular network. She then began a panicked, 16-hour odyssey to find an antidote that could save her 22-year-old son.
While his leg began to swell and he grew faint, she trekked across a landscape of cut-off streets, security checkpoints, disconnected phones and hobbled doctors.
Doctors and patients say the two-month-old lockdown in the Valley, imposed since the central government revoked Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy, has taken many lives, mostly because of the communication blackout that includes a suspension of the Internet.
Cancer patients who buy medicine online have been unable to place orders. Without cell service, doctors can’t talk to each other, find specialists or get critical information to help them in life-or-death situations. And because most Kashmiris haven’t got landlines at their homes, they can’t call for help.
“At least a dozen patients have died because they could not call an ambulance or could not reach hospital on time, the majority of them with heart-related disease,’’ said Sadaat, a doctor in a Kashmir hospital who did not want to be identified by his full name for fear of reprisals.
Many doctors interviewed for this article said they could be fired for even speaking with reporters.
Kashmiri doctors have also accused the security forces of harassing and intimidating medical personnel.
Government officials reject the accusations, saying hospitals have been functioning normally, even under the restrictions, and that health-care workers and emergency patients have been given passes to travel through checkpoints.
“There was no loss of life caused by restrictions,” said Rohit Kansal, a government official. “We have saved more lives than we have lost.”
But several health officials, based on hospital records, estimate that hundreds of people have been left in an emergency situation without ambulances, and that many may have died as a result of that and other communication problems, though there are no centrally compiled figures.
“People have died because they had no access to a phone or could not call an ambulance,” said Ramani Atkuri, one of more than a dozen Indian doctors who signed a recent letter urging the government to lift the restrictions.
Doctors at the Sri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital in Srinagar said there had been a 50 per cent fall in the number of surgeries in the past two months because of the restrictions and drug shortages.
Several young doctors said their work had been particularly hampered by the loss of the mobile phone service. When they needed help from senior doctors, they lost precious time racing around the hospital searching for them.
For Begum’s family, time had become the enemy.
On August 13, her son Amir Farooq Dar, a student whose college has been closed since early August, was tending his family’s sheep in an orchard near the town of Baramulla when he was bitten by a krait, a poisonous snake.
Most bites are fatal unless polyvalent, an antivenin medication, is injected in the first six hours. Begum cinched a rope around her son’s leg, hoping it would slow the poison. She then ran, with her son leaning against her, to the village public health centre, which usually stocks the antidote. The centre was closed.
She shouted for help and begged for a ride to Baramulla’s district hospital. But doctors there were unable to help, the family said, because they could not locate any antidote. They then arranged for an ambulance to take the young man to a hospital in Srinagar.
Soldiers stopped the ambulance many times on the way, the family said. Amir was slowly closing his eyes. He told his mother, in a drowsy voice, that he could not feel his right leg.
At least two hours had passed. Sometime later, Amir and his family finally made it to Soura Hospital in Srinagar.
The bad news came yet again: Soura Hospital had none of the antivenin, either.
What the family did not know then was that the first hospital they had visited, in Baramulla, actually had the antidote in a locked storeroom. But the clerk who controlled the storeroom had not been around and could not be reached by phone.
In Srinagar, the family travelled frantically from pharmacy to pharmacy pleading for the antidote. Nothing. They arrived at the gate of an army camp, which normally stocks the antivenin, but were told to come back the next day.
After every failed trip, Begum shouted at her husband, Farooq Ahmad Dar, “Sell everything, but save him!”
Farooq, 46, said he had never felt so helpless. “I felt like pushing a knife into my chest,” he said.
At 10.30am the next day, 16 hours after he was bitten, Amir died. His parents then travelled 55 miles back home, in an ambulance, with his body.
The antivenin arrived two days later at the hospital, from a city more than 150 miles away. It came in 30 vials in a van along with other medicines.
In late August, a Kashmiri urologist, Omar Salim, rode a bicycle along a deserted street to Srinagar’s hub of media offices, in a doctor’s apron, a poster hung to his chest. His plea: restore phone and Internet services.
He was promptly arrested. Police officers let him go after a few hours with a warning not to do it again.
“We may not be in a formal prison, but this is nothing less than incarceration,” Salim said in a recent interview.
A cardiologist who works at a Srinagar hospital said he had recently received a patient who had suffered a heart attack. The patient needed a procedure that required the help of a specialised technician, but the technician was not at the hospital.
Fearing that the patient could die, and with no way to call the technician, the cardiologist drove five miles in pitch darkness to the technician’s neighbourhood and searched for him. The doctor didn’t know exactly where he lived and had to keep asking people to lead him to the technician’s house.
The doctor said that he and the technician managed to save the patient’s life, but that Kashmir has been “thrown into the Stone Age”.
Last month, Raziya Khan was pregnant when she developed complications. But she and her husband, Bilal Mandoo, who are poor apple farmers, live in a small village seven miles from the nearest hospital and couldn’t call an ambulance because of the phone blockages.
The couple walked the seven miles, taking hours because of her worsening condition. They made it to the hospital, but were then sent to a bigger hospital in Srinagar. It was too late, and they lost their baby.
“Had there been a phone working, I would have called an ambulance right to my house,” Mandoo said.