All Quiet on the Northern Front

Blood on the ground. Fear in the air. Hope on the horizon. Hundred days have passed since terrorists murdered 26 tourists on April 22 in Pahalgam's idyllic Baisaran meadow. Now Kashmir and Kashmiris are trapped between two deadly vectors: the fear of being dragged out of home and shot by security forces and fear of terrorists committing another massacre which would further disrupt the conflict torn economy of the state that had begun to sprout some green shoots.

- IRAM ARA IBRAHIM

Nafisa Dar, 28, is a student at the University of Kashmir. Her PhD dissertation is due in two weeks, but she is distraught; her eyes keep drifting towards the broken roof of her house. Her 60-year-old father, Manzoor Dar, spent his lifetime savings on building the house which is situated in the border village of Chowkibal, 40 km from the Line of Control. Now the building is battle-scarred. The walls are blackened, there is the skeletal remain of the outer boundary, the roof has a gaping hole in it. Nafisa and her father (names changed), are wary of talking about what they went through. “How do we talk of lives paused, sleep cycles disrupted, savings depleted, and to rebuild what we had already built,” Nafisa laments. During the night of May 8, the day after Operation Sindoor, the Pakistan Army resorted to heavy shelling across the LoC—Kupwara, Baramulla, Uri and Akhnoor areas were hit badly. The ceasefire between India and Pakistan may have paused the military conflict, but for Kashmiris like Nafisa and her family, turbulent times are far from over. “We want peace. We have careers to build. The vulnerability of living in a border town can’t keep pushing us back,” Nafisa says. Other families in the area share her pain. Basant Sharma and his cousin Alok Sharma are working on the village Sarpanch Mohmad Maqbool Khan's broken house. The Sharma brothers are construction workers from Bihar and have been living in the Valley since 2007. “We have lived here for almost 20 years. But the looming fear of violence doesn’t allow us to take the risk of bringing our families here,” rues Basant. The contract to rebuild the Sarpanch’s house was given to them two weeks after the carnage in May. “The cost of repair has touched ₹3 lakh already. It is difficult to bring material up here. Maqbool sahab told me that the government is yet to give any compensation,” Alok says. Across the road from the house, a grocery store owner laughs at the mention of government compensation. “You kno