Hyderpora: Security forces erect sand bags in front of murals painted by Kashmir University students

While the sandbag bunkers are slowly returning to Srinagar, the Hyderpora bunker has raised many eyebrows especially as the spot was chosen by the government to showcase the valley culture.

“One year, they paint the walls to showcase culture, to send a positive image of valley and next year they set-up a bunker year. Don’t they now want to showcase this image of Kashmir,” said Muntazim Rasool, a college student. “They have no sense, they don’t know what they are doing”.

The initiative to paint the city walls was launched by Srinagar Municipal Corporation in May 2015 with an aim to “fill the blank spaces and give the current generation an insight into what we were”. SMC had said that it is a pilot project and that it would wait for reactions from people before moving further. The project was launched under supervision of Masood Hussain, valley’s leading artist.

“It is very unfortunate,” says Hussain. “They should not have done this. If they (young artists) will see or come to know about it, they will feel hurt. Those who have taken this initiative of (erecting) bunker there, I don’t think they have an aesthetic sense. And we can’t really educate them what it means to the public”.

Maria Shahmiri (23) was one of the six young artists, who worked on these murals for almost three weeks. “It is a shameful act. I am just learning it from you,” she said on telephone from New Delhi. “We have worked hard on these murals and look what have they done now”.

Maria says that the Srinagar Municipal Corporation had promised to pay them seven lakhs rupees for painting these murals but they haven’t received a penny. “They didn’t give us anything, and now they have not even cared for our hard work”, she said.