Bloodied and battered, the wounded arrive daily at the emergency room here, the casualties of weeks of protests against gun-toting Indian police and security forces that spill even into the hospital corridors.
On a day late last month, three patients — Habibullah Tiploo; his teenage daughter, Sumaira; and his daughter-in-law, Fatima — were the first to arrive. The family says Tiploo was shot by security forces outside his home; as Fatima and Sumaira, 17, rushed to his aid, they were fired upon, too.
According to a police statement, protesters were lobbing stones at a nearby bunker and the three Tiploos were wounded when the police retaliated with bullets. The family denies being part of any protest.
Protesters swarmed into the emergency room with them, struggling with doctors in surgical aprons and masks to force their way into the operating room. Some slipped past, took over Fatima’s hospital bed and wheeled it to the X-ray room as they chanted the same slogans that have filled the streets, angry words echoing off the walls and drowning out the wails of grieving friends and relatives.
“The Kashmir which we have irrigated with our blood — that Kashmir is ours!” they chanted.
The melee was common enough at the hospital, the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, where more than 500 patients have come in with bullet wounds, lacerations and bruises in the past three months.
They are often carried by scores of protesters, who take the turmoil of the streets into the hospital with them, making the emergency room a miniature of Kashmir’s conflict and a window on the ways it has overturned the lives of just about every Kashmiri, irrespective of class or professional status.
The staff members at the Srinagar hospital have been dealing with such scenes on a regular basis since June 11, when thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to protest the death of Tufail Mattoo, a teenager who was hit by a tear gas canister.
The mass protests and subsequent response by security forces have left 65 civilians dead and countless injured, a casualty toll that has escalated in the past month. Last month alone, the hospital staff here received 345 patients as a result of the conflict, compared with roughly 150 during June and July combined.
The city is subjected to nearly continuous strikes by protesters agitating for independence for Kashmir, the prize of a tug of war between India and Pakistan, which have each held a part of the territory since their partition more than 60 years ago. The curfews called by the government to quell the demonstrations have effectively shut the city down.
For the hospital staff, the journey to work is a daily exercise in resourcefulness and courage. While the rest of the city sleeps, holes up in houses and stays away from windows that tend to be the targets of stones from protesters, the doctors and paramedical staffs of the Kashmir Valley’s hospitals must still report for duty.
Many doctors, who brave the gantlet either in their own cars or in hospital ambulances that serve as stealth commuter buses, complained of being caught in protesting mobs almost daily.
Some said they were not allowed to pass by protesters or security forces, even if they arrived in an ambulance, which the police had indicated should have kept them safe. The local news media have reported that some doctors on their way to work have been brutalized by police and security forces, or arrested.
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