Arun Joshi
Kashmir is a paradise on earth — a poetic statement that lifts our spirits and imagination and throws us back to the Mughal era, invoking the irresistible charm of the beauty of forests, mountains, rivers and lakes in the Valley.
The Valley retains much of its charm for tourists despite loot of forests and unending greed of encroachers stretching up to water bodies with the help of the bribery-driven system. This is good news.
The bad news is: travelling on the road to Kashmir is a nightmare of unspeakable proportions. Along with the death of the historical highway — originally Banihal Cart road, constructed during the royal era of the Dogras — the death of several tourist spots on its two sides has been fast-tracked by the political indifference to the need for basic connectivity.
It is a backbone-breaking journey on the potholed, ever-shrinking and sinking highway from Jammu to Srinagar. Landslides and the sinking portions of the highway have reduced the safety of travellers. It is a miracle if a day passes off without any accident. There are no parapets, trucks remain parked on both sides and the traffic police are present in hordes to take their “hafta”, but not to regulate traffic.
With the ever-increasing number of vehicles on the highway, there is a traffic jam after almost every 100 yards or so. This highway in the 1950s was meant for 200 vehicles per day. Now, the number has moved up to five digits, a toll on its ecology. Many of the waterfalls have disappeared, the mountainside is becoming barren and rivulets have been reduced to a trickle.
Work on a new four-lane highway with some promise of a wide and smooth surface is going on for decades now. The National Highways Authority of India has given contracts to some incompetent companies for reasons best known to it. The opaqueness is a norm here, perpetuated by the
vested interests of politicians of all hues.
When opaqueness is the norm, transparency goes for a toss. The new highway skips many towns and villages and tourist spots. Huge chunks of the population and their places have been systemically denied of connectivity. The tourist spots crying for attention have been further marginalised with roads connecting them having been left to become dirt tracks.
Nadini, Jajjar Kotli, Kud, Patnitop, Batote, Sansar — where the rivulets and dense deodar trees have some traces of rising tree line — are waiting for their inevitable death as Delhi has no plan or intention to inject them with a life-saving connectivity. The commitment of better connectivity and development of tourism is nothing but rhetoric.
When Kashmir was convulsing under violence, these spots kept tourism alive in Jammu and Kashmir. Feeling suffocated in this ever-sickening atmosphere, which they blame on their representatives in Parliament and the Assembly, a silent rebellion against the apathetic system is brewing.
“How long can we live in these nightmarish conditions” is a common refrain among people here, seething with anger over the indifferent attitude of their “elected representatives”. The erstwhile Doda region is also called the Chenab valley — the nomenclature is a byproduct of polarisation in the state. They find themselves as victims of so-called development.
The dam of the Baglihar hydroelectric project — a paradoxical symbol of the state’s power potential and that of the corruption and uncaring attitude of the rulers toward the masses — has brought down several portions of their road that is connected to the highway. This road has become a death trap. The statistics of death by accident on the Batote-Kishtwar highway that connects the Jammu-Srinagar highway are frightening.
Unexplored or abandoned tourist spots — Kishtwar, Bhaderwah, Padder, Marwah-Dacchan — have no reliable connectivity. “Everyone wants our waters (Chenab river), be it Srinagar or Delhi, but no one cares to give safety and security to our lives” is another refrain that echoes in this region.
These are genuine expressions of their deep-seated anxiety and rising anger. It threatens to snowball into major trouble, I am putting it mildly.
Nightmare of nightmares in J&K
