How Kashmir Has Kept Up A Slow-Burning Protest Since Article 370 Was Revoked scroll.in

Around 4 pm on November 20, the shops around Lal Chowk suddenly snapped shut. It was not clear what had happened. At the stationer’s on Polo View Road, the shopkeeper said unknown men had ransacked a store on Hari Singh High Street. A cosmetic store owner in Ghoni Khan market said the police had paid a visit. At Makka Market, advertised as the “Valley’s first flea market”, stall owners said nothing had happened at all.

November 20 was a rare day in three-and-a half months that the markets had actually stayed open since the morning. Since August 5, when the Centre stripped Jammu and Kashmir of special status under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution and split the state into two Union Territories, shops had been shut in protest for much of the day. In most parts of the Valley, they opened for about an hour or two in the morning so that people could buy supplies. It was only in November that they started staying open for longer, sometimes furtively, half shuttered.