London: Kashmir Centre London has said that the world marks International Literacy Day on September 8th followed by the International Day to Protect Education from Attack on September 9th. In Indian Occupied Kashmir, these two dates collide uncomfortably because for many Kashmiri children, the classroom, a place of safety and learning has instead been made in to a battleground.In a statement issued on Thursday, Kashmir Centre London said that after the 2019 revocation of Article 370, Kashmir schools in IOK were closed for six months during the initial lockdown. When students in India moved to online learning during the COVID pandemic, India's regime that illegally occupies Jammu and Kashmir denied the children of IOK their right to education and literacy because internet access was not restored.An estimated two million school-age children lost nearly two years of formal education across the two overlapping lockdowns. Two years lost that could have been prevented but just as Indian military attack children 's bodies, their minds and education are not spared either.Internet, curfew and shutdowns are not the only weapons used against education in IOK. A people who speak Koshur (Kashmiri), and Urdu, are expected to adopt the National Education Policy of India promoting Sanskrit and Hindi, fuelling further marginalisation. In 2025, 25 books were banned in Jammu and Kashmir from history to religious. Moving from the physical shutdown of schooling towards the mental manipulation of what can and cannot be learned.Yet through the resilience of the people, the literacy rate 98.43 per cent. This number isn't to be simply celebrated as an achievement but the question asked, why must a people, children, be stronger than their attacker and shouldn't access to education be a civil right for all?Literacy without the freedom to learn safely, continuously, and in one's own language is only half a right. Kashmir's classrooms, repeatedly darkened by shutdowns and unrest, are where that gap is most visible.