In the gathering dusk of a Kuwait evening, on a busy ring road near Saad Abdullah town, five men from the hills of Poonch and Rajouri met a fate no family should ever have to hear described. Their vehicle, returning from a day’s labour, collided head-on with another and caught fire. Most could not escape. They were charred to death where they sat – far from home, far from the mountains they knew, far from the families for whom they had crossed seas and deserts in search of a wage. Four of the five dead hail from the Surankote sub-division in the Poonch district. The fifth was from Darra in Thanamandi, Rajouri. They were sole breadwinners. They were sons and fathers and husbands who had gone to Kuwait not out of ambition but out of necessity, carrying the weight of families who had no other option.
Now those families face a grief compounded by helplessness. The bodies lie in a Kuwait City hospital, awaiting legal formalities. And in a bitter irony that speaks volumes about the abandoned condition of J&K’s migrant poor, it is fellow workers – themselves labouring on foreign soil – who are pooling their modest wages to fund the repatriation. The Government has yet to step forward with anything beyond acknowledgement. The families have appealed to the Lieutenant Governor, the Chief Minister, and the Ministry of External Affairs. Those appeals must not be left to move at a bureaucratic pace. The MEA has consular mechanisms precisely for such moments, and the J&K administration has both the moral obligation and the political means to push hard through those channels. Coordinating swiftly with Indian diplomatic missions in Kuwait is the minimum the state owes these families.
The backdrop makes urgency more pressing still. The broader Gulf region remains unsettled amid the ongoing Iran-US tensions, with Kuwait navigating a difficult neighbourhood. Consular access and logistical corridors are not guaranteed to remain straightforward. Every day of delay is another day of unbearable waiting for families already shattered. But a broader question is why young men from Poonch and Rajouri are crossing the world to do manual labour in Gulf heat, risking their lives. The migrant trail to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait is not a choice but compulsions. They are not the only ones out there. It’s time J&K builds an economy that offers its youth something better than this kind of distant risk.
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