Kashmir drowns alone again

"It was like judgment day," my mother told me over the phone, sobbing.

On Saturday, my parents trudged their way through neck-deep waters in Srinagar's Hyderpora neighbourhood to reach a relative's house a few kilometres away.

My two-year-old niece was on my father's shoulders.

My uncle, who lives in Raj Bagh, an area that has been considered the worst hit, had to evacuate in the middle of the night, carrying his differently-abled son on his back. No help came.

From Saturday (September 6) till Tuesday (September 9), I could not get through to anyone in either Srinagar or other parts of Kashmir. No updates were coming from anywhere.

Sitting helpless in Delhi, as the water levels kept rising, I kept dialling numbers in vain. One night I was on the phone till morning unable to get through anyone on my phonebook.

I woke up on Sunday morning to read that River Jehlum had swollen, breached its banks at many areas, and the entire city was witnessing the worst floods in 50 years.

Harrowing posts were being put up on Facebook and Twitter, most of them SOS messages, with people asking for immediate help.

I tried calling the state government's helpline numbers. The operators, who answered, failed to give adequate information. The state government's efforts to rescue those stranded had stopped even before they began.

Jammu and Kashmir's massive force of Irrigation and Flood Control department has done nothing, except for issuing a tertiary warning asking people living along the embankments of the Jehlum to evacuate.

In the afternoon, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared on news channels after taking an aerial tour of the Valley.

He declared it a "national-level disaster". Help was set in motion. Hundreds of troops were moved, including those of the National Disaster Response Force.

By Tuesday evening, the Army claimed to have rescued roughly more than 49,000 people. But on the ground, lakhs are still stranded, and help has not reached them.

Unfortunately, the narrative in newsrooms has now shifted from the catastrophic impact of the floods to urging Kashmiris to be thankful for being rescued.

Kashmir is a testimony of ironies. The handling of the floods is one more. The rains, which began in Kashmir on September 3, bore all signs of a tragedy. Yet, the state government could barely scramble enough resources to minimise the damage. The Army's help, my friends tell me, is selective. They're only helping tourists.

Almost all the help was and continues to come from local volunteer groups run and set up by young Kashmiri boys. Relief camps have been set up across the city of Srinagar and some other parts of the Valley. Almost all the camps are now being run by local mohalla committees and not by the government.

The tragedy of Kashmir is that even a disaster of this scale is being used as a tool to form a state narrative - this time it is the Army's narrative. While the state government remains absent from the scene, and Army choppers make selective sorties, it is the lakhs of Kashmiris who continue to fight on. My heart goes out for the lakhs of people still trapped as drinking water and food run out.

The flood waters might be receding slowly by the hour, but the miseries of the people are not.