The cold reality

Having survived the earthquake, thousands of people in the mountains around Tangdhar and Uri living out in the open have to face the Himalayan winter, which can cover the region in up to eight feet of snow.

PRAVEEN SWAMI in Tangdhar

SHE counts off their names with an expression as blank as the fallen stones that used to be her home: Naved, Wajid, Salma, Fayyaz, Raviz. Two days after the earthquake, Hamida Begum buried the five children she had lost under the debris. Then, armed with a pressure-cooker lid for a shovel, she, along with her relatives, set about digging to salvage whatever she could to help her two surviving children see through the winter.

Each discovery is brought out with the care that might be normally reserved for a treasured family belonging - the plastic sheets that were used to keep the rain off the family livestock, crushed pots that can be banged back into shape with a brick, clothes for the children that had been stored away, the crude carpets that covered the living room and can now be used to shield her family against the cold. A neighbour has brought out a prize possession, a sofa set which can be hacked up for firewood should the need arise.

Hamida Begum has turned away offers of help from soldiers passing through the village to search for bodies. "We need to dig for the living now," she says, "not for the dead."

Iqra Ishtiaq, one of Hamida Begum's surviving children, has been running a cold and fever: nights out, huddled against her mother in the rain-swept autumn cold, have taken their toll. Her tragedy could just be beginning.

Somewhere underneath the heaps of rock and broken wood lies the body of Adalat Khan, a mentally challenged 20-year-old from the nearby hamlet of Badarkot who used to spend his nights where he wished.

A week after the earthquake, tens of thousands of families still spend their nights in crude shelters, fabricated from tin sheets and tarpaulin salvaged from their destroyed homes. Although massive supplies of tents, blankets and food have reached Uri and Tangdhar, the two towns to which road links from Srinagar are available, there is no mechanism to get them to the villages most in need. Officials simply do not have the personnel needed to haul supplies, particularly the heavy eight- and ten-man canvas tents, across treacherous mountain paths. Villagers, in turn, cannot leave their homes to spend the entire day fighting for whatever they can get in the chaotic relief distribution centres in the towns. Hamlets are scattered across the mountains, and air-dropping supplies is not practical.

Gundishot is a two-hour walk across the mountains from Tangdhar. Two large logs thrown across the raging Qazi nullah (a mountain stream) are its only link to the road that once connected Tangdhar to Teetwal. After the earthquake, the road itself was overwhelmed by landslides which could take up to a fortnight to clear, that is, if it does not rain too hard and more rock does not come down. No supplies of any kind have made their way down the hills and across the Qazi nullah. Soldiers have visited the village to search for bodies and have made simple meals of rice and dal to those who ask for it. Not a single tent or blanket, though, has arrived; not even a promise that they are on their way.

Conditions are much the same in nearby hamlets. Desperate villagers from the twin hamlets of Ibkot and Badarkot, where at least 26 people died, made the long trek to Tangdhar four days after the tragedy. They came back empty-handed, for villagers closer to the road-head had already taken what was available. Local army units have handed out blankets, mainly to labourers who worked with them hauling supplies across the mountains, and have made food available to all. "If it wasn't for the Army," says village elder Ghulam Mohammad Ashraf, "we would have starved, but the way things are, we might not live long anyway."

Soon after the village delegation returned with nothing to show for its efforts, 72-year-old Fatima Begum, returned to her destroyed home and started the futile and dangerous task of removing the debris to salvage whatever she could. "It is better I die doing something," she says, "rather than die waiting".

Fatima Begum's sense of urgency is pragmatic. From the field outside her house, she can see the beautiful carpet of snow on the tops of the Shamsabari Range, the wall of mountain that stands between the Tangdhar region and the Kashmir Valley.

Snow began to fall on the high mountains two days after the earthquake. The valley below has been experiencing incessant rain, making air support and efforts to clear debris from the remote roads increasingly difficult. Soon, up to eight feet of snow will fill the Tangdhar Valley, and temperatures will plummet as low as -15{+0} Celsius. For people living outdoor and for their livestock, a key economic asset in the mountains, survival will be virtually impossible. Roads in the region will be blocked for up to four months. Families usually stock grain, fuel and other essential commodities for the period that they are cut off. This year, with family stocks decimated and little cash in hand, no one is sure how the people of Tangdhar and Uri will survive the winter.

Sadly, the desperation and fear provoked by the inevitability of what lies ahead has brought out the worst in the residents. Three days after the earthquake, tired of waiting for aid, some people in Kandi looted a relief truck. A minor riot then broke out among those who managed to get the materials and those who did not. One man was injured in a scuffle with the village headman, Mohammad Siraj-ud-Din, two others received blows to the head from an irate policeman, and a dozen others suffered bruises as families fought for the relief materials. Inside the truck were 60 tents and a few dozen blankets for 300 families. There was no food or fuel.

Many in the region blame their deprivation on local politicians. Conspiracy theories are rife. "We voted for the People's Democratic Party (PDP)," says Sajjad Ahmad from Gundishot, "and the local MLA, Kafeel-ur-Rahman, is making sure that supplies reach only those who backed the National Conference." Khokpara, from where Rahman hails, has become a favoured target of local ire. "They're even keeping livestock under tents there," says Zahid Ali, a resident of Dildar. "I've seen it with my own eyes." Ali's `eyewitness' account turned out to be a lie, for there were just two tents in Khokpara, each sheltering about a dozen people.

Stories like those told by Ali are not dishonest as such; they are just dramatic amplifications. The fact is that relatively well-connected residents - those with access to the administration, government servants, or individuals with political connections - succeeded in getting relief before others. "My family has not eaten in three days," says Abdul Hamid of Kandi Bala, "but our village Sarpanch has managed to distribute tents and blankets to all his family members." Villages like Tangdhar, helped both by the fact that they had road connections to the rest of the world and by the presence of the regional trading and contractor elite there, succeeded in making sure they received more than a fair share of the aid.

It is impossible to miss the ways in which rural hierarchies are replicating themselves in tragedy. In Teetwal, the town's most affluent families have found themselves a home in the well-built and warm Primary Heath Centre. Labourers and peasants have built ramshackle plastic tents near the village mosque, while the poorest - mainly those displaced from hamlets - are still camping out on open ground near the Neelam river.

SOME Kashmir-based leaders, such as the All Parties Hurriyat Conference leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, complain that the country has failed to open its heart and its coffers for the victims: there simply is not enough aid. But the fact is that there is more than enough aid, but it is not getting to the right places. Another fact is that no amount of aid may help avert the coming crisis.

By the Jammu and Kashmir government's estimates, 42,750 homes were destroyed and another 73,450 were damaged. The State government intends to give Rs.100,000 each to the families that have lost their homes to enable them to rebuild. No road map has yet been made public on how the rest of the aid committed by New Delhi will be used - the Rs.11.6 billion that will be needed, even if each affected family is given the full Rs.100,000, amounts to a sixth of what is available - but it will presumably go into paying for rebuilding roads, schools, hospitals and rural infrastructure. Military officials say they will seek reimbursement for the missions their aircraft flew, but it is unclear how large this bill will be and whether the Ministry of Defence will present it to the Union Finance Ministry or to the Jammu and Kashmir government.

Is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's aid package, then, enough? While reliable population data are hard to come by - the Jammu and Kashmir government's official web site uses 1981 and 1991 data - the numbers of registered voters in each zone can be used to provide some insight into the scale of the problem. According to the Election Commission of India's data on the three tehsils hit by the earthquake, Karnah had 28,948 registered voters in 2002, while Uri had 63,429 and Poonch-Haveli 49,984. Even if one makes the excessive assumption that every two registered voters represent an entire family, the Rs.65 billion committed by the Prime Minister to the earthquake victims would give each of these an average of over Rs.92,000 in compensation: an enormous figure, particularly given that Poonch-Haveli has barely been affected.

By way of contrast, the States affected by the tsunami, which destroyed not just homes but livelihoods, received a total of Rs.640 billion in aid - 10 times that committed for earthquake victims, although an order of 20 times as many people died in the latest disaster. Claims of stinginess might be polemically effective but they are also hugely misleading.

What is also true, though, is that Manmohan Singh could have tripled the aid commitment and it would have made no impact on the ground. Even if the Jammu and Kashmir government gets its act together, and disburses reconstruction relief in a rapid, corruption-free manner over the coming days, the coming winter will make rebuilding impossible. Once the snow begins to fall in the Tangdhar and Uri regions, cement and mortar simply will not dry. Hastily constructed roofs will not take the weight of the snow that will be deposited on them. Even if a solution to these problems were to be found, the region does not possess the surpluses of labour needed to sustain a massive rebuilding effort. Right now little thought seems to have gone into how people whose houses have been destroyed can weather out the winter.

IN Teetwal, the metallic whine of helicopter blades interrupts conversations with an almost metronomic regularity. Army helicopters have been landing a 100 metres or so from the Line of Control, flying out casualties and flying in officials and television crew. It has been a massive effort. On one single day after the earthquake, Army aviators flew out over 300 injured. Cheetah helicopters have no autopilot systems, so the task involved pushing pilots to operate the aircraft even though their hands had become bruised from gripping the controls.

Across the Neelam river, which marks the Line of Control (LoC), there are no signs of relief efforts. Small processions of villagers, mostly relatives of those who live in Teetwal, can be seen marching down the strategically vital Neelam Valley highway with what they have been able to salvage. No trucks, let alone helicopters, have been seen on the other side of the LoC so far. And yet, to the residents of Teetwal, their situation does not seem all that different from that across the LoC. The stark truth is that the helicopters are cold comfort: the Army's efforts have helped take the injured to hospitals in Baramulla and Srinagar, but done little for those who have had to stay behind.

Both politics and pragmatic concerns have ensured that the residents of Teetwal are still waiting for relief, despite the massive amounts of aid flowing into the region. With roads blocked, it would have made good sense to fly in supplies to Teetwal, from where they could have been hauled to the more remote villages in Tangdhar. At first, the Army needed permission from the Pakistani authorities to fly into the region, since an agreement bars the use of aircraft less than one kilometre from the LoC. Then, the Indian Air Force (IAF) said it could not risk operating cargo helicopters on untested helipads such as the makeshift one in Teetwal. If the ground gave way, the IAF said, its large helicopters would be unable to lift off again.

All the air supply effort has really brought to Teetwal is the hatred of distant villagers, who see the helicopters land and have persuaded themselves that the supplies they imagine are being shipped in are being hoarded in the village.

Twenty-eight people died in Teetwal; four are still missing, presumed dead. Adil Husain Shah, a prosperous businessman, counts them among the lucky. "No one is going to survive the winter here unless tents start coming in very soon," he says. Across the LoC, everyone is most likely wishing they were in Teetwal. In Teetwal, anyone with the means knows it is the last place they want to be. Shah has his escape plans ready. "My wife's family is in Srinagar," he says, "and as soon as I've sorted out a few things here, I'm going to hike across the mountains to Tangdhar. Anyone who stays on here is insane." Or poor - the kind who have no relatives in Srinagar who can house them for six months.

Three days before the earthquake, a wandering Sufi mystic from the mountains above the frontier hamlet of Kandi arrived in the local bazaar with prophecies of calamity. "Repent your ways, sinners," he would say to the small gaggle of children who tailed him shouting out taunts, "for death will soon stalk this land." He had no other audience, for the villagers had been hearing the same warnings of doom for decades. "I never took him seriously," says Abdul Hamid, whose home in Khorpara was levelled by the earthquake, "and I don't take him seriously now. Still, I can't help but hope that the prophecy has been fulfilled now - not in the winter to come."