Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
This a tale of two capital cities of a major State in the North-Jammu, the winter capital and Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir State. The recent unprecedented rains there, the villain of my story.
There is a vital difference though: the extra-ordinary energy of river Tawi, a notoriously ill-tempered river which loses hardly an opportunity to rid itself of any extra waters in its catchment area and as these waters gathers mass they do not waste a moment before turning into a flash flood or a long, unrelenting rainfall helping the waters rush onwards, not a moment wasted, meandering here and there, into rivulets or nullahs. All moving in unison.
Everything that comes in the way vanishes in a flash, house, man, beast and even a few bridges disappear in seconds. Not to forget the hamlets that never seem to learn a lesson; a new lot reappears in on the waterbed almost within moments of the earlier lot having been washed away.
The rampaging waters have no respect for the fields that you and yours may have so loving by reared, your effort to tend to these in the hope of reaping a rich harvest gone to waste in a split second.
So Jammu city in a way may have gotten used to the brief ill-tempered and usually flashy ways of the Tawi even as it brings in its trail heartbreaking tales of suffering, of washing away habitats, unsparing of the unwary habitant. Not even military encampments escape the might of the angry river waters, mowing down electric towers, village granaries and sweeping waters not unoften causing much damages to populous towns like Poonch, Rajouri, Reasi.
Tawi is in the habit of dispensing quick and severe punishment, no respector of persons or places is she. Nothing is spared, not the poorly built, solid -looking yet vulnerable bridges across the river. Road abutments and the like get washed by the first gush of water.
Its sister river The Chenab has its own ways of dealing with those who may over the years have tinkered with its course or kept nibbling at steep mountain backs to carve out large stretches in the search for space for humans and their machines to commute.
We better rush to the summer capital. Jhelum, its beloved river literally divides the city of Srinagar and the better part of the Valley thereafter, into two halves. The Jhelum for the most part looks a pretty waterway unwinding its way from the famed Verinag spring, Pir Panjal range foothills, through the heart of the valley past many Kashmiri towns, sometimes sharing its waters with the Dal but usually keeping to its path down to the now shrinking Wullar Lake to Sopore and on to Baramulla and thence to POK and Pakistan.
The last time it suffered a bout of ill temper of a magnitude comparable to the present one was in 1906. In between there have been major floods but not of this intensity, both in terms of water disgorged into the highways, lanes and by lanes, the houses, humble and the haughty ones, built recklessly on either sides of the capital, nor in terms of the multi-billion damage caused to property, the rich tourist infrastructure, to its horticulture.
Worse, it has permanently dented the State Government’s image, irreparably so. As I visited the two ravaged capitals for the second time in three weeks I was surprised by the quickness with which Jammu had recovered its lost elan so quickly. The reason was obvious, though, that Tawi unlike what the Jhelum did, struck in a quick burst wrought the destruction it did and moved on. The loss of lives because of the suddenness may have been heavy as a consequence; the damage was caused – and very severe it indeed was -in a few districts in Jammu province.
But Srinagar the summer capital was for the most part submerged; many residential colonies, the plush and the poor, were living with two to three feet of water indoors, over two weeks after it had risen up to fourth floor. A friend who I was able to contact after two weeks of trying had the shocking discovery of a bovine carcass in a large third floor room to talk to me about. He didn’t know whether it was a stray cow that the waters had brought to his house, or was it the animal instinct of the dying cow that had made it swim one extra bit to what the animal perhaps saw as a safe haven.
It will be a stupid man who ever again makes the mistake of looking at the Jhelum as a harmless waterway. Yet, man himself, every Kashmiri man, woman and child must bear the responsibility for having turned this beautiful gift from the gods into an all devouring monster, a kind of the Brahmaputra at it its foulest.
It is hard to tell if the authorities will ever want to have the causes of the disaster publicly known. What is perhaps needed is to let a hundred heads roll after they have been singled out, following a thorough inquiry into the causes that led the Jhelum to be choked.
Remember the river has rarely if ever been dredged properly. Remember major water bodies like Anchar Lake and now slowly but not so stealthily the Dal Lake is being reclaimed, newer colonies springing up week after week, politicians and bureaucrats acting as accessories in crime. Even Wular Lake is spared. A former Chief Secretary of the State had set the ball rolling here with a palatial building coming up on the hill slop overlooking Manasbal and Wular Lakes; several landfills have already been made and it may not be long before a Governor or Chief Executive of the State, may ask for a Raj Bhavan or CM’s residence to built on the same hillock overlooking Manasbal and Wular Lakes.
Finally will someone please order an inquiry into how many of the thousands of buildings and residential colonies that have come up during the past 30 years have had sanctioned plans, and which politicians hand was behind the land grab. For a city that I guess must have a population of around 10 lakhs if not more what kind of drainage system it boasts of. I am not going into other transparent infrastructural inadequacies.
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