Kashmiris Cope With Flooding, and Resentment of India
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Version 0 of 1. SRINAGAR, Kashmir — When an Indian military helicopter hovered low over a relief camp set up in a mosque in Kashmir’s capital on a recent afternoon, a crowd formed on the ground below, but it was not the grateful, grasping crowd one might expect amid a natural catastrophe. The thudding rotors interrupted a speech after Friday Prayer by an aging leader of Kashmir’s separatists, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who was criticizing the government for not coming to the aid of the flood victims quickly enough. The helicopter dropped sacks of food aid into a graveyard, but there were few takers. People threw them to the ground, pouring the grain inside onto the grass between headstones, and hurled bags over the fence onto the street below. “We don’t want food from India,” some cried. Others asked where the relief had been for the past five days. It has been a week since the Jhelum River breached its banks and inundated Srinagar’s labyrinthine old streets, driving tens of thousands of families from their homes, destroying maize and paddy crops, and clogging stagnant waters with the carcasses of dead animals. Deadly flooding occurs regularly across India, and rescue operations are often slow and scattershot. But Kashmir stands out for its bottled-up tension. Government relief has been difficult to come by. Commentators here have already begun to compare this disaster to Hurricane Katrina, for its devastation of a famously picturesque city and also for its emotional backdrop: It is unfolding in a place where, for historical reasons, trust between the populace and the central government is so low that some relief deliveries have dissolved into open confrontation. For decades, India has maintained hundreds of thousands of security force members in Kashmir to fight an insurgency sponsored by Pakistan, which claims this border region. Though the insurgency is mainly vanquished, the Indian forces remain, occasionally facing stone-throwing revolts by young Kashmiri men who have grown up bristling under their gaze. “There is obviously this huge accumulated experience with the army, which is, of course, anything but pleasant,” said Parvaiz Bukhari, a journalist in Srinagar who was trapped in his home for four days before he was rescued by other residents in a canoe. He echoed the complaints of many of his neighbors, saying that the soldiers made it a priority to rescue the trapped families of the police and government officials, and avoided heavily Muslim neighborhoods. “For many, it was like these people were rubbing salt on their wounds,” he said. For the first week of the crisis, it was rare to find a police officer or a government official in the streets of Srinagar. Citizens organized themselves into relief crews, paddling homemade rafts or pleasure boats loaded with food and medicine. Today, water remains waist deep in some places, choked with empty bottles and plastic bags. Many remain in relief camps, wearing the grimy clothes they were wearing a week ago, but others have returned to half-drowned neighborhoods, preferring to rely on themselves rather than on the state. Government rescue workers, for their part, described trying to operate a convoluted supply chain while facing a panicked, distrustful public. One soldier pointed at a broken window on his truck, which he said was caused by a crowd of stone-throwing men, and said his team was finally forced to abandon a boat and withdraw from the neighborhood. He said Kashmiri civilians might have mistaken his uniform — he was dressed in fatigues, with a padded vest, and carried a rifle — for full combat gear. “It was a relief operation, not a tactical operation,” he said, a little sadly. A National Disaster Response Force raft sat idle in one of the capital’s residential neighborhoods. Gambhir Singh Negi, the deputy commandant in charge, said that he had been waiting to unload a truck of 50,000 parcels of food and drinking water that the central government had sent to distribute, but it had been stopped by a crowd on the way from the airport. The truck never arrived. Mr. Negi gave a rueful smile. He said he had spent five days in the flood zone, waiting, but had not yet received a single shipment of aid from the government. “The public won’t cooperate to allow us to reach the real victims,” he said, in an interview on Friday. India’s army has deployed 30,000 troops for relief operations in the affected area and has rescued 234,000 people, according to a daily update released by the Press Information Bureau, accompanied by a selection of photographs of marine commandos, in shorts and T-shirts, carrying stranded Kashmiris to safety. Top officials, asked about reports that relief crews were pelted with stones, have dismissed the reports as the work of separatist agitators. Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, remarked that “the usual elements are fishing in troubled waters, stone pelting and attacks are being provoked.” But he has acknowledged that the government was unable to respond adequately in any way during the early days of the crisis, in part because of failed telephone service. “I can’t remember a single natural disaster in the country where the government tasked with responding was so completely paralyzed,” Mr. Abdullah wrote in an article published Sunday in The Indian Express. “We had no way to communicate with anyone, and other than a walkie talkie set,” he continued, “we were totally and completely isolated from everyone and everywhere.” Though the episodes of violence may look familiar, Gull Wani, who directs the Institute of Kashmir Studies at Kashmir University, warned against assuming it represented separatist feeling. “At this point, anything coming from the government, a government vehicle passing through the street, would be pelted with stones,” he said. “It’s not necessarily for the old reasons, but because the government has not been able to deal with the current situation. The state government disappeared, because the state government were themselves caught in this disasters.” The few open roads in Srinagar are choked by people making long, grim marches from one side of the city to another, knee-deep in water. They carry jute sacks on their backs, gourds and apples in their arms. Some have taken the hourslong journey merely hoping to bring word back of relatives’ whereabouts. Near a bridge going into the downtown neighborhood of Batamaloo, one man said that he had carried two children on either hip and waded through waist-deep water to dry land. He collapsed on the road, and spent the night shivering on a grassy divider. Another said he spent his nights sleeping in his car with his father, mother and sister. A third said that he managed to make it back to his home on Friday to find everything — furniture, clothes, pots and pans — washed away. |