Won’t Let The Frost Sink Deep

The slender Hajipir stream has a ridge to its other side that dots Pakistani army posts. In light wintry mist, the water is a trickle when viewed from Hathlanga village overlooking the nallah sliding down the thick foliage of walnut trees and conifers. It is, though, no time to take in the scenic beauty—the caution comes from an Indian soldier. “Risky for you to walk around,” he says, stepping out of a fortified bunker. “Pakistani troops know each person of this hamlet. They may target unfamiliar faces.”

Hajipir is, after all, the Line of Control in this area, 15 km off Uri in Baramulla district of Jammu and Kashmir. If you are a stranger to Hathlanga, there is an ethnic dress that can work as a de facto shield: the phiran and poots. The colourful two-gown garment extending up to the feet may lead the sniper across the LoC to believe that you are a local.

Things weren’t this dicey till three months ago. Tension mounted after September 18, when four Fidayeen militants attacked the army’s brigade headquarters at Uri town, killing 18 army men and injuring as many. Since then, there have been infrequent exchanges of fire between the two armies positioned on the mountains on either banks of the Hajipir. The residents say they are living on the edge amid fears of shootouts escalating into heavy mortar shelling.

One fallout of the skirmishes is a rise in the security checking. The army does not allow any movement of “outsiders”, including journalists, to the villages that are right on the military control line. Tata Sumos double as passenger vehicles, and ply on the cratered route twice a day, but they are not permitted entry into hamlets such as Hathlanga or Silikote. The residents, instead, need to trek up to their houses from the gates of the border fencing—the villages are across the fence but inside the LoC.

The de facto border was drawn in 1972 following the Simla Pact between India and Pakistan, and life in Hathlanga remained relatively calm for the next two decades. Mirza Mohammad, a head of the village, recalls how the rural pocket bustled with activity till 1990, when it had a “substantial” population. Then happened an outbreak of insurgency. It triggered large-scale migration towards Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) in 1990. “Often, security forces would charge villagers of facilitating cross-border movement of Kashmiri militants,” says Mirza, 72. “Troubled by frequent checking, searches and arrests, the villagers journeyed towards the other side. The migration reduced the village’s number of households by a third—to 30.”

The movement has not stopped yet. In 2014, a young woman crossed the LoC after a tiff with her family in Hathlanga. Shakeela Bano reached Ladi village in the Pakistan side, and later turned up at her uncle’s house in Bagh city, 90 km from the PoK capital of Muzaffarabad. This summer, she was repatriated. Relatives welcomed 30-year-old Shakeela in end-April soon after she crossed the Kaman Aman Setu from the border spot of Chakothi.

The same overpass, also called Peace Bridge since it was opened in mid-2005, facilitated another family reunion later this year. An angry Shamima Akhtar, too, had left her family in Soura of this locality in a huff and crossed the LoC. What followed were negotiations between the armies of Pakistan and India, eventually leading to her return to the native village within a fortnight—on September 9.

Uri sub-divisional magistrate Showkat Ahmad Rather sports a glimmer of hope when he rewinds such stories. The Peace Bridge, it turns out, has facilitated more than its original idea of promoting cross-LoC bus service and trade between the two Kashmiris, he notes. Hathlanga’s panchayat member Muhammad, however, is worried about renewed exchanges of fire between the two armies. “It can turn the clock back to the 1990s when heavy shelling made life miserable for us,” he says.

The anxiety isn’t out of place. On December 1, for instance, Mohammad Ramzan finds that his new home in Hathlanga has not enabled him to find the peace he missed in Srinagar as a mason. A native of neighbouring Balkote village, the 40-year-old had been working in the house of elderly Mohammad Shafi, whose two sons are in the Army. Ramzan did masonry for six days at Shafi’s place, earning Rs 600 a day.

The assignment came to an abrupt end, as night-time firing between Indian and Pakistani forces disturbed the mason’s sleep. “My wages are the same in Srinagar and Uri. It was for a quiet routine that I came to work in this village,” he says.

It is invariably after sunset that the Pakistani army would, at times, fire towards Hathlanga. “The exchange of fire will last for a few minutes,” he says, prompting the villagers to find refuge in kothas—those small huts made of mud and wood. “Calm soon returns and the whole village remains peaceful during daytime. We are not much nervous about the present situation, but if shelling starts, it will be dangerous to live here.”

All the same, Hajipir road, which leads to the Silikote hamlet, has not fallen into fear. At Balkote, youngsters continue to play cricket on the streets. Labourers with the roads and building department are busy repairing the thoroughfares that landslides have damaged at several stretches. Students walk back home from school. Mohammad Iqbal, a class-9 student of Balkote High School, enjoys the company of his friends strolling to his village, Motahal. “We scale around four km every day to reach to school,” he says.

Silikote, also located on the LoC, has soldiers guarding the village at the fencing gate that disallows entry to “visitors”, courtesy close monitoring by the Pakistani army. Ghulam Ahmad Parray, a shopkeeper at Hajipir road, says Silikote was once a busy trade route linking Poonch district with Uri and further to PoK’s Bagh. The 1947 Partition led to its inevitable closure.

Then, in the 1965 War, when India captured Hajipir Pass at 13,620, the road remained open—for six months. India returned Hajipir Pass back to Pakistan after that country withdrew from Chhamb sector in Jammu following the Tashkent agreement between the two neighbours. That time, Parray was a young boy. He travelled to Halan in PoK through the Hajipir road. “I don’t have any relatives there. I took the road, as it was open. The walk was thrilling,” he says. “Today, there are no such luxuries. Far from that, there are only insecurities.”

Parray hopes for de-escalation between the two countries. The frequent exchange of gunfire should stop, he adds.

The bustling main market of Uri, 10 km from Silikote, is open on December 2—unlike in other parts of the Valley. For, it is a Friday, and the separatist amalgam of the Hurriyat Conference has given a strike call. It comes as solace for, say, Attaullah Handoo, an LoC-based trader. As a functionary of the Uri Traders Association, he is more keen to talk about cross-border trade than the firing. “We must get more facilities for the business to thrive and flourish,” he adds.

The cross LoC trade between the divided segments of Kashmir began eight years ago. To be precise, on October 21, 2008 after a successful experiment of the cross-LoC travel that started in 2005 summer. The cross-LoC trade is seen as the biggest Kashmir-centric confidence-building measure between New Delhi and Islamabad, featuring 21 listed items being traded on barter system—with zero involvement cash or net banking. Both sides have constructed trade facilitation centres (TFCs), around 5 km inside the LoC. The trucks from the PoK have permits to enter up to the TFCs: at Salamabad in Kashmir’s Uri and at Chakandabagh at Jammu’s Poonch. There, the trucks unload the goods, which are then reloaded onto local trucks for onward journey. The trade is conducted four days a week: Tuesday to Friday.

Handoo has just sent a truck full of bananas to his PoK counterpart he has never seen, and is expecting almonds in return. “The items on trade list remain the same,” he says. “There is no substitute for them.”

The Uri traders speak of a recent disagreement between fellow professionals in Amritsar and Lahore conducting operations via Wagah border in Punjab. “The issue was resolved. Now, trucks laden with tomato at Salamabad TFC have to return to Srinagar,” Handoo says. “For such an emergency, we need a cold storage facility here.”

According to Rather, trade worth Rs 5,300 crore—all cashless—has taken place across the LoC since 2008. “Close to 84,000 vehicles crossed between the two parts of Kashmir in this period.” The prevailing tension post Uri has not stopped cross-LoC bus service and trade.

But authorities cannot afford to remain contented. Far away from the care-free market of Uri, Senior Superintendent Police Imtiyaz Hussain Mir sits in his Baramulla town office, anxious about a surge in tension in that area of the LoC in his area. “Stone-throwing protests have come down in Baramulla. It is almost over,” he says. “But there have been attempts of infiltration.”

By Naseer Ganai in Hathlanga