SYED ALI Shah Geelani, still the fulcrum of pro-Pakistan politics in Kashmir, is 86 but has lost none of his sting. Of the recent great flood in Kashmir, probably the worst since the era when, according to legend, the Valley was an enormous lake, the stalwart says the Indian government — its Army and other agencies — were unconcerned about the fate of the people and had not prepared sufficiently to forestall such an eventuality.
No one could be ready for anything so dire, I interject. I was visiting him in his Srinagar home recently. But he brushes me aside with “J&K is an Indian military cantonment.” My argument is, if that’s the case, all the more reason the Army would have done what it could to avert a catastrophe that might badly hurt it.
In fact, the Badami Bagh cantonment in Srinagar, the headquarters of the Army in the Kashmir Valley, was under 25 feet of water for the first two days after the Jhelum broke its banks on September 7 and enveloped much of the ancient city. Mr Geelani is unmoved by such logic.
However, thanks to the news neophytes who hovered in the skies from copters, pointed television cameras at all and sundry, and said some very strange things, the Army has lost the perception battle in the wake of the flood.
And this could likely have a big political cost if the general reaction in Kashmir is anything to go by. Though itself beleaguered, the Army was first out in the rescue effort. Some in the Valley still say they wouldn’t be alive but for the Army. They were extricated from precarious situations. Armed forces copters flew “hundreds of sorties” says Firdous Syed, a former top militant leader now given to a life of reflection. But Mr Syed cautions, “Please find out if alienation has grown or lessened.”
It is hard to find anyone in Kashmir who is not angry with TV coverage of the rescue effort when the city capsized. The complaint is that television journalists made those rescued appear to be supplicants and the Army a noble doer of favours. Evidently, the force became a victim of its own publicity hunger, or it wouldn’t have made it a point to have a TV camera in tow when it went looking for the marooned.
To make matters worse, television extolled the Army but ignored the massive act of rescue and relief done by local volunteers in their make-shift rafts. This has hurt Kashmiri pride. The general buzz is that local volunteers, often using make-shift floating objects, did three quarters of the rescue ops.
Senior administration and police officials agree. IGP Abdul Ghani Mir, in fact, cites the case of Sampora in South Kashmir, about six kilometres from saffron-growing Pampore. Fifteen men of Rashtriya Rifles were trapped there in raging flood water. All but two, whose bodies were later found, were brought to safety by the people of this town, a well-known militant area.
Television journalists played the obverse side of the separatists who praise “our brave youth” and run down the Army. They became jingoist Indians in a time of calamity and created hostile perceptions. This could lead to a backlash in a state where separatist sentiment is easy to mobilise.
The flood has meant devastation on a scale hard to believe, but fatalities are mercifully relatively low. Three weeks after disaster struck, the official count was 47 dead in Srinagar and 81 in the Valley overall. One shudders to think what the public reaction might have been if the dead had been in the hundreds, leave alone the thousands.