The plight of the ordinary Kashmiri

Besides the floods, Kashmiris also had to fight the indifference of authorities

About 10 days ago, a friend who works as a manager in a private bank in Srinagar, rang me up. He sounded perturbed and agitated. He said: “How can you people in the media ignore what is happening here? It's serious. It's flooded everywhere and the authorities are nowhere in sight.” 

 

He complained he was disgusted with the long power cuts and flooding outside his house. Therefore, he had stepped into rubber boots and made his way to office on a holiday, hoping he would find electricity at least there.

 

I was shaken by his call. I went online to find out more about the floods. I learnt that the situation there was grim. In the absence of any assistance from authorities, Kashmiris had taken matters into their own hands and started helping out their friends and families.

 

In the next few days, news from Kashmir in general and Srinagar in particular was getting more alarming. I became anxious because I could not get in touch with my banker friend any longer. All phone lines were down.

 

My friends and I spent the whole of last week frantically trying to make contact with our friends in Kashmir. The only one I could reach was stuck in Jammu. He said he had gone there for work, but could not return because of the floods. He was desperate to know the whereabouts of his parents in Nishad Bagh locality; he wanted to know if the residents there were safe. Based on the information I had got from some Kashmiri journalists, I assured him that the area was largely unaffected.

 

After five days, the banker friend called up to narrate horror stories. He said that over the weekend, the water had risen up to 12 feet. The entire neighbourhood was inundated and his family moved to the second floor. Because of the lack of water and adequte ration, his mother and his pregnant wife had to be moved out with the help of a neighbour in a resuce boat. There was not enough space for my friend on the boat. Hence, he had to swim to safety. And the ghastly part was: he bumped into a floating body.

 

He had taken shelter in a mosque that had practically become a relief camp. “Since someone had helped my family, it was my turn to help others,” he said, adding that along with some young men, he formed a rescue team.

 

The phone conversation with him ended after a while. There were still many friends in Kashmir I could not contact despite the government's claim that “all phone lines have been restored”. I finally got information about the whereabouts of a Kashmiri journalist friend through the blog she wrote about her family’s harrowing experiences.

 

The last time I visited Kashmir, the place truly deserved the moniker, Paradise on Earth. The Srinagar that I saw was mesmerising, with its gentle swaying ‘chinaars’, its beautiful gardens, and its gliding ‘shikaras’ snaking their way through the canals in morning mist. Now, I'm told is far from recognisable. Sludge and floating carcasses have gutted the waterways. With the water now receding, the buildings bear the mark of that unbelievably high water level.

 

It's been close to two weeks now and our banker friend is still in that makeshift relief camp trying to help people make their way back home.

Kashmiris are still struggling to get back on their feet, busy helping each other as well as coming to terms with the natural calamity. They say they have no time to get into the politics of relief by separatists and their ilk. As my Kashmiri friends put it: “All that matters is that human lives have to be saved. We are not concerned with anything else.”