Tales from border towns: Where peace arrives in brief spasms

For over three decades, the fate of Indians residing in towns and villages along the border with Pakistan has been worse than that of Kashmiri Pandits. The Kashmiri Pandits, an oft-cited case study of persecution and displacement, had to flee to Jammu and other parts of the country in the late 1990s when targeted killings by terrorists forced their exodus from the Kashmir Valley. Ever since, any discussion on displacement of people within Jammu & Kashmir has, for the most part, revolved around the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits.

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Yet, as is often the case with most persecuted communities, displacement was a one-time ordeal for the Kashmiri Pandits – no doubt a tragedy of horrendous proportions. For residents of J&K’s border areas, it’s a tragedy that has been running on a loop for over 30 years.

Loss, displacement and rebuilding

In 2014, as Pakistan’s artillery shells and mortars began raining down on Treva, Asha Devi was forced to flee the ‘border village’ located along the International Border between India from Pakistan in the Jammu division. Asha, then pregnant with twins, walked 30-odd kilometres to take shelter in a relief camp set up by the local administration in Bishnah town of Jammu district. When the situation ‘normalised’ along the border after some days, Asha returned to Treva. A few months later, her twins were born – Harsh and Krish and she spent the next decade raising them while simultaneously rebuilding what she could of her home and life with the scarce financial resources she had.

Last week, those scenes from 11 years ago played out in Asha’s life once again as Pakistan began raining artillery shells, mortars, projectiles and drones.

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On the intervening night of May 6 and 7, to avenge the killing of 26 civilians in J&K’s Pahalgam on April 22 by Pakistani terrorists, India launched precision strikes at nine terror hotspots in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). Within 24 hours, the Pakistani Armed Forces began targeting India’s western frontier. The worst hit on the Indian side were border towns and villages of the Jammu division; Treva being just one of them. For three days, the conflict escalated swiftly.

For many across the country, who have the luxury of cheering for a conflict that isn’t on their doorstep, salivating for a full-scale war to annihilate Pakistan is easy. For Asha and countless others living along the border, any armed escalation merely reboots the vicious cycle of loss, displacement and rebuilding.

And so, as Treva came under heavy cross-border fire on May 8, it was 2014 all over again for Asha. The only difference this time was that she now relived her past horror with her sons – the loss of their home, projectiles of death shooting down from the skies, the hurried escape, the march to Bishnah, that familiar refuge at a temporary relief centre that seemed more permanent than their home in Treva and then the march back to their village to start afresh.

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At least 30 other families from Treva took refuge at the Bishnah shelter. Many more from other border towns and villages made their way to similar relief centres set up by the local administration in other parts of Jammu district and Jammu town.

Peace arrives only in brief spasms

The relentless and ruthless cycle of death, destruction and displacement is a lived and shared experience of many families like Asha’s all along the border with Pakistan. Peace arrives only in brief spasms, always teetering on the edge of violence, always an unfamiliar aberration no matter how long it may last. Destruction and displacement, however, as Asha says, come with a “sense of familiarity and painful nostalgia”.

India’s Maximum City, Mumbai, often hailed for its resilience, has long moved on from the horrors visited upon her during the 26/11 terror attacks but this spirit of moving on is something Mishriwala, on the outskirts of Jammu City, can only dream of.

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Like in Bishnah, a temporary relief camp was set up in Mishriwala too last week to cater to the hordes of helpless residents fleeing Akhnoor and adjoining border areas. For the elderly who arrived seeking refuge in Mishriwala, a sense of déjà vu that must have also hit Asha when she returned to Bishnah, was hard to shake off. Many of them had made their way to Mishriwala back in 1999 too when the Kargil War was raging on.

Two generations have grown up since the Kargil War ended but at the relief camp in Mishriwala it was as if the clock had simply been wound back in time. Amid the otherwise solemn silence that blared across the Mishriwala camp, the one refrain heard under numbed voices was painfully reminiscent of that title of Kiran Desai’s Booker-winning novel – Inheritance of Loss. Displacement, one Akhnoor local at the camp told this reporter, “isn’t a life story a grandfather tells his grandson in these parts; it’s a sad reality that the grandfather relives with his grandson”.

Agonisingly ironic is also how many residents of border villages view displacement as being lucky, as an ‘easy’ choice to make when the only other available alternative is death.

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The rest of India may choose to believe that ceasefire violations along the border happen once in decades and the ‘collateral damage’ these wreak can be justified because India’s response to Pakistan’s escalation is, as DGMO Lt. Col. Rajiv Ghai repeatedly asserted over the past week, “fierce and punitive”.

In reality, though, ceasefire violations are more way frequent than residents across the nation or the political masters sitting in Delhi may choose to acknowledge.

Just as people living near airports grow used to the roar of aircraft landings and take-offs or those residing near railway stations to the chugging of trains, border residents of Jammu have grown up listening to the explosive bursts of artillery fire. It is only the frequency of these violations that changes from time to time. So, cross-border firing for a few hours or a mortar blasting a hole in a home or an agricultural field is ‘normal’. It is only when the violations are prolonged that things become ‘abnormal’.

The year Asha first made her way to the Bishnah shelter, 2014, was a year of such abnormal times. Over 550 incidents of ceasefire violations were recorded in that one year alone – a bulk of them between August and October; the highest since the 2003 ‘ceasefire agreement’ between India and Pakistan came into force.

20 lives lost across Jammu’s border areas

Mishriwala had seen a flux of migrants from Akhnoor that year too. Over 32,000 people were displaced from the border towns and villages across J&K’s Jammu Division alone in 2014. But, as mentioned earlier, displacement isn’t an option available uniformly to all.

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This reporter vividly recalls visiting the Akhnoor sector, the worst hit 11 years ago. In one border village, while villagers were fleeing for Mishriwala and other safer havens, a woman in her 80s, sat despondently at her small two-room house; its tin roof blown to smithereens by a mortar shell the previous day. Her son and his family had fled, leaving her behind with barely enough food to last a day or two. Rebuffing any help to be taken to a shelter, she told this reporter that having survived the curse of the borderlands for 80 long years and seen multiple cycles of death, destruction and displacement, she had no intention to leave her home now.

Last week’s sudden escalation claimed, by official estimates, over 20 lives across Jammu’s border areas – 16 of them in Poonch alone. An estimate of the financial losses from destruction of homes, commercial establishments, crops, et al, is yet to be calculated, while the long-term cost of rebuilding lives rarely finds even a mention in these figures.

Some 25 years ago, this reporter was part of a press party that the Indian Army had decided to take on a ‘tour’ of border areas being ravaged by cross-border infiltration and armed escalation long after the Kargil War had ended. At the time, farmers were barred from harvesting crops right up to the zero line – the border; severely hampering agricultural production and by extension the economic well-being of those who owned large tracts of land but could not monetise it in any way. A common demand of farmers back then was that they be permitted to cultivate their land all the way to the border and, in the inevitable event of their crop being lost to ceasefire violations, be adequately compensated.

Two years ago, in a bid to hard-sell the narrative of lasting peace and normalcy having returned to J&K with the abrogation of Article 370, the government began encouraging farmers to resume cultivation right up to the border with the assurance of full financial assistance if their crop is lost to cross-border conflict.

Last week, as vast acres of standing crop along the border were laid to waste by artillery fire, those assurances from the government rang hollow. Forget compensation, in their celebration of the success of Operation Sindoor, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and most leading lights of his government, who have by now made multiple public speeches on India’s triumph, failed to even condole the deaths of civilians in Poonch and other Jammu areas.

On Friday (May 16), as Asha made her way back to Treva with her sons, she had no words to either celebrate Operation Sindoor’s success or mourn the loss of all she had lost in this week past. All she managed to say when this reporter asked what she and her sons would do upon their return to Treva was, “rebuild” and hope that the next round of “destruction and displacement comes after a longer pause than the previous one”. A scenario that this next round will not come didn’t even cross her mind.