Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
TV, given its limited memory, unlike the 225-year-old memory of the newspaper I spent the better part of my working life with, was quick to inform us that the great deluge that has overwhelmed Jammu and Kashmir, the valley in particular, with summer capital Srinagar bearing the brunt of it, was the worst flood in the state in 60 years.
Having spent these many years as a reporter, I don’t recall anything like this one having hit the State earlier. Yes, there have been floods in the State even before. In fact folkore tells us that Kashmir, the whole of it, was one massive water body until the great sages had it turned into an Asian Switzerland, the moot point being that Switzerland probably was as yet unknown, far indeed from being called heaven on earth.
All that the Rishis needed to give us Kashmir, our paradise on earth was to let loose a bird of paradise, a pebble firmly held in the beak, to fly over the big lake, drop the pebble in the massive water below and, lo and behold, Kashmir was born.
Sadly there were no Rishis or birds around this time over when the rain gods lashed the State, Kashmir, more severely than Jammu, and Srinagar, the overcrowded, ill-planned capital, devastatingly so. The deluge has yet again exposed the danger of allowing a city to grow mindlessly, with not a thought spared for its present and future needs.
A burgeoning city, putting on an ugly mass, seemingly awash with riches, but inherently incapable of looking after itself and allowed to grow along the banks of the Jhelum, choked by years of silt, a weir in the downtown region adding to the woes, and callous successive administrations failing to build even a basic infrastructure, literally exposing the city and its million odd people to be drowned out, flashy buildings and fancy bazaars notwithstanding. It is nature’s wrath that has finally fallen on the State, exposing once again the inadequacies of the systems supposedly in place.
I heartily agree with Dr. Karan Singh when he said during the week that he had not seen anything like what had befallen the State this past week. He should know; his ancestors had ruled Jammu & Kashmir and indeed one of them had had the foresight then to build bunds along the course the Jhelum took while passing through Srinagar. Yes the same bund which later became home to some of Kashmir’s famous business houses, selling anything from expensive carpets and to traditional wares like handicrafts, to expensive shawls and filigree work.
Each shop would flaunt the legend, emblazoned at the top of every sign board “By appointment to Her Majesty … His Majesty… His Excellency”. Yes, even the two big wine stores on the bund did inform the prospective bibber “By appointment to His Royal Highness etc etc”. The Bund, like the Boulevard, along the Dal lake shoreline now, was a must see spot.
Alas, all that has this past week been engulfed by the furious waters of the Jhelum and its upstream rivulets and nullahs. Two of the houses I stayed in just three weeks back, have not been spared by the muddy waters. And these were no ordinary, traditional Kashmiri houses. In the bigger of the two, water had entered the ground floor while the other one vaguely resembled the once famed koturkhana, the Maharaja’s fishing lodge in the middle of the Dal Lake.
And to think of the mess the authorities made of a situation fraught with possibilities of getting messier! In the valley, Srinagar in particular, there obviously was no effort at setting up ordinary things like relief camps for those whose houses were inundated; the civil administration had obviously chosen deep slumber as the way out for it. The local police, too, seemed to have taken a week off and hence the absence of local know-how when the Army and the Air Force commenced rescue operations. That’s how it looks to me on the idiot box.
Jammu’s Tawi River is notorious for its flash floods, striking as quickly as they vanish. This time Tawi looked even more furious and flashy, sweeping across the region with rare fury, the angry waters taking a few bridges along as rushed through at maddening speeds; in Reasi, Rajouri, Poonch districts to the flood waters seemed unsparing in their ferocity.
But nature had obviously reserved its worst for the valley and the summer capital, Srinagar in particular. Let’s leave nature alone for a while. There obviously had been a warning, less than a day ahead of the Jhelum’s fury, valuable hours lost, for lack of proper follow-up. Ironically the flood warning was accompanied by Home Minister Rajnath Singh’s direction to the State Government to earmark land for the resettlement of Kashmiri Pandit migrants forced out of the valley in the 1990s, a thought that probably didn’t go well with a valley threatened just then by a severe flood.
Rajnath Singh has wisely not made a mention of it these past few days but the import of the initial message was perhaps not lost. The same day’s deluge changed all that – at least for the present.
What followed will remain etched in memory, the city of Srinagar turned into a sea of water, with the odd tree top and the rooftops helpfully reminding that it indeed was the city. High streets and low, the lanes and the by -lanes suddenly turned into rivers and nullahs, with the difference that no boats were plying, only faces peered from behind second and third floor windows, wanly turning skywards hoping for miracles to happen.
By the time the Air Force choppers and the Army and its boats appeared on the scene the situation had become very grim, with worry and anger writ large on every single face, those peering through the window panes and the ones trying to keep their heads out of the swirling waters.
You can’t possibly lift half a million people, young and old, men, women and children, from their waterlogged abodes, an impossibility, given that there weren’t many open spaces available for choppers to land at, certainly not the slanted tin roofs of Srinagar that don’t make for a landing pad, unlike, in the Jammu region, where the flat concrete roofs abound making chopper landings very simple indeed.
Without getting further involved in the nitty gritty of the rescue operations one thing that stands out is the total apathy of the so-called political class. For the first four days not one political heavyweight was to be seen anywhere. The Chief Minister was to be seen on TV screens but with the capital city without power he might as well have saved himself the bother. A major failure was the Central and State authorities’ failure to restore telephonic connectivity within the State and a cause therefore a great anger among the people.
To be sure the separatist Hurriyat leader Ali Shah Geelani, speaking from his well secured home premises, added his two bits of venom to the situation, reminding the Indian State that it was bound to carry out relief and rescue work under the Geneva conventions to which it was a signatory. As an occupied territory, Kashmir has the right to seek rescue and relief from the occupier in these circumstances.
Follow our WhatsApp channel