AFTER THE DELUGE, THE FOG

[Vivek Mehta]

AFTER THE DELUGE, THE FOG
by Jawed Naqvi
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(Dawn, September 23rd, 2014)

UJJAIN University’s vice chancellor, J.L. Kaul, is an old-fashioned Kashmiri Pandit,
a man of liberal values, somewhat in Nehru’s genial mould. Armed men of the Hindutva
brigade mercilessly beat him up the other day. Why had he appealed to the city’s
landlords who housed Kashmiri students to forgo the month’s rent, the men demanded
to know.

Mr Kaul obviously thought the students could use the savings in their own small way
to help their families cope with the catastrophe that has swamped their homeland.
But the agitated men of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal, seen as the sword
arm of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s anti-Muslim political coterie, saw Mr Kaul as
a traitor to their cause. While the vice chancellor was rushed off to the hospital,
a shattered portrait of Mahatma Gandhi remained fixed to his office wall to tell the
story.

Bile also flowed copiously on TV channels like stale, putrid water of vicious
intent. Why were the Kashmiri traitors now accepting help from the Indian army,
whose soldiers, on any given day, they wanted to vacate their strife-stricken
region? The Hindutva chorus was loud and enormous.

They mocked the Kashmiri Muslims, and when the Muslims, not unused to their abuses,
came out to help trapped Hindu neighbours or to bail out Indian tourists from the
swirling deluge, they were still regarded with scorn. Elections are due in Kashmir
later this year, and Mr Modi’s party was hoping to inject a large dose of communal
polarisation to exploit it. The flood calamity interrupted the trajectory. The party
will need some way to crawl back to its comfort zone of religious identity before it
gets late.
The BJP was hoping to exploit the Kashmir polls but the floods interrupted its
trajectory.

A TV channel accused Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front chief Yasin Malik of hijacking
an official boat with food supplies. It was a damned good thing if he did that
because TV footage, which was apparently never aired for reasons not so hidden from
the discerning eye, showed an overwhelmed Sanatani Hindu priest from Uttar Pradesh.
He never seemed to tire of repeating how he owed his life and that of 200-plus Hindu
men and women, including his mother who was a nun on a pilgrimage to Kashmir, to Mr
Malik’s rescue act.

“I am a Brahmin from UP, and in our community we are not allowed to touch food or
water that has been handled by a Muslim,” the Hindu holy man confessed. “But I have
to say this publicly that it was only due to the timely help of Yasin Malik — I
don’t know the man, and I don’t care what you think of him — that so many of us are
alive today.”

There was no administration worth the name, the man shouted to the shocked woman
journalist who seemed surprised by the unusual bonding between a Muslim-hating
priest and a former separatist militant. “Without the many kilos of cooked yellow
rice Yasin plied for us in his boat, we would have perished.” There were stories of
the army going all out to rescue trapped people, but the sadhu seemed unaware of
that. Another report spoke of Muslim women helping a Hindu visitor deliver her baby
in the melee.

“If they took the state apparatus and its innate prejudices out of the equation,
Indians are adept at helping each other out,” declaimed a young man readying himself
to wade into chest-deep waters near Maisooma, close to Mr Malik’s home in downtown
Srinagar. Stranded people had coped similarly the previous year with little help
from the state when thousands of Hindu pilgrims were trapped and many killed in the
flash floods that hit Uttarakhand.

Unaware of the floodwaters snaking towards Srinagar’s living rooms on Sept 3,
environment experts and peace activists from Delhi were winding up a fortuitous
meeting in a ramshackle hotel in Jammu. For some years now, the local chapter of the
Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy has been nudging its civil
society partners on pervasive if intractable issues such as peace and human rights
that concern people on both sides of the Line of Control.

The issue this time round was palpable and urgent. The focus, the meeting decided,
was to be put squarely on the deleterious impact on the Himalayan ecology of human
greed and military strife, chiefly on the river systems its alarmingly denuded
snow-peaks and melting glaciers were struggling to feed. In this context, the
decades-old stand-off between India and Pakistan in the Siachen Glacier — seen by an
American observer as a fight between two bald men over a comb — came in for flak.

Mr Modi and his fawning supporters may continue to believe that the sacred Ganges
river they worship flows from the matted dreadlocks of Lord Shiva. An excellent UNDP
documentary shown at the Jammu conclave, however, offered a different explanation
for the plight of the Ganges as also for its origins. The river flowed from the same
ecological system as the Indus and the Brahmaputra, Mekong and Yellow rivers, and
they all leaned on the depleting Himalayan reservoirs for sustenance.

More than 50,000 glaciers are rapidly shrinking in the Himalayan mountain region
threatening billions of lives and livelihoods throughout Asia, according the
documentary Himalayan Meltdown. Kashmir, Uttarkhand, Bihar, Assam have routinely
experienced the depredations.

In much of South Asia, the link between the sea and the mountains has not been fully
grasped. In Nepal, for example, climate change is not only melting the Himalayan
glaciers, it is also leading to drought and ironically, inordinately rising sea
levels. Many communities, as shown in the documentary, have seen seasonal monsoon
rains disappear. One of the solutions helping villagers adapt is the use of low-cost
moisture-trapping nets that convert fog into drinking water. Is that going to be the
way forward for Kashmir now, to pray for the fog to descend?

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.