Shelling from both sides has been going on since 21 February, and residents now living in relief camps have had enough.
Uri/Silikote/Tilawari: With a grief-stricken face, Saja Begum sits with her two daughters in the school-turned-relief camp in north Kashmir’s Uri town. Begum is from Silikote, the last village on the LoC and an easy target for the shelling from the other side.
Begum’s family of seven – including her husband who bears the scars of shelling from back in 2001 – has been rendered homeless after their house was reduced to ashes by mortar shells from the Pakistani side on 23 February.
While women console Begum, there is an uneasy calm inside the classroom, where every villager has a story to tell.
Irshad Ahmed Chalkoo is one of five people who show their amputated legs to every stranger who walks into the relief camp. Chalkoo lost his leg three days before he was set to join the Army in 2001, when he was hit by a shell. Then, in 2003, his mother was killed by three sniper shots to her stomach.
In every classroom, victims with amputated legs, blindness and other physical and mental scars come forward to present the evidence of the unending skirmishes between the two sides.
Tanvir Chalkoo, an angry villager from Silikote, says: “If India and Pakistan cannot make peace or rehabilitate us, let the government give us a chance to take a peace flag on foot to the other side.”
Escalation of shelling
The tension in the Uri sector is mounting, with shelling from both sides of the LoC continuing since 22 February. The 2003 ceasefire agreement has been violated with persistent cross-fire and shelling in border areas of Jammu and now Uri, 105 km from Srinagar.
After the recent terror attack on the Sunjuwan Military Camp in Jammu, the guns have roared back from the Indian side too. The aggression from both sides is visible at the LoC, with alert and wary soldiers at their pickets.
Farooq Ahmed Kali, a local who retired from the Army in 2010, said: “Even Bofors guns have been used in past few days.”
People from ten villages — Silikote, Tilawari, Charunda, Hathlanga, Batgram, Balkote, Sura, Saidpora, Galkote and Namla — with a population of over 7,000, have started to live in fear again.
Panic struck on the morning of 23 February, when heavy shelling left a house gutted. The administration started evacuations in the afternoon. However, locals living right on the edge of the fence dividing the two sides of the LoC said the shelling had begun on 21 February.
“Around 100-150 people started leaving the villages of Silikote and Tilawari on 22 February, but we had to send ambulances on 23 February after people got frantic due to heavy shelling from Pakistan. Till now, 1,500 persons have been evacuated,” sub-divisional magistrate Sagar D. said.
With a mortar shell in his hand, Haji Abdullah Beigh of Tilawari said “this is the life we live”. Beigh lives with 16 family members, and while other members and their neighbours ran to Uri town, he stayed back. “I have left everything to Allah,” he said.
The administration, in fact, was trying to convince the villagers in a school-turned-relief camp to return home Tuesday, but the Army warned about continuing shelling and shots from the other side.
“I have met Army officials in the picket at Silikote and come to a conclusion — some people are still in their houses; I have left the decision (to leave or not) up to them. Those who were evacuated will continue to be in the relief camp for now,” Sagar added.
‘India started it this time’
The village head of Tilawari, Haji Ghulam Mir, alleged that the shelling started from the Indian side this time.
“The Pakistanis made announcements on the loudspeakers for us. They said, ‘we have casualties on our side and we will retaliate. We warn the villagers on the other side to leave’. I was bound to tell the people to leave,” he said.
Army officials reject this charge. “Pakistan has been desperately violating the ceasefire on and off for the last one year, and we retaliate every time,” an Army spokesperson told ThePrint.
Position of disadvantage
The barbed wire fence on the LoC has torn apart three villages — Silikote, Tilawari and Charunda — where Indian Army pickets are the target of the Pakistan Army on the opposite mountain.
While the Pakistani pickets are visibly at a higher altitude, the pickets on the Indian side are positioned on the mountain area around a basin of gushing water. The houses lying in the middle of the basin on the Tilawari side, which is opposite Silikote, are surrounded by barbed wire and a gate operated by the picket. The fence is approximately 10 feet long and 20 feet wide, in between which many families of these villages are sandwiched.
“When the shelling worsened, the villagers raised an alarm but the gate was closed. Can you imagine how the kids would have stayed there?” asked Mehbooba from Thajal in Tilawari.
The angry woman directly pointed fingers at Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “Modi is sitting in New Delhi. Had he come here, he would know what it is to live in a border area. People in Delhi only give sermons, they do nothing for us. Why don’t they resolve this matter once and for all?” she asked.
The gunshot from both sides is not the solution, the same thing once continued in between UK & French. Today they are close friends so to say one country. When the same will happen in India-Pakistan, the nation created by Gandhi, a destroyer of India but the Indians under the patronage of Nehru declared him the FATHER of the nation, a travesty of truth