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Journalism of Courage
Mohammad Riyaz, 35, is bedridden, now in a neighbour’s house, with multiple fractures in his leg, while his eight-year-old nephew Waseem walks the banks of river Tawi looking for any possible trace of his uncle’s house which was washed away along with nearly three dozen others.
“There is now water all over the area which once was a colony with pucca houses,” says Waseem, who was rescued along with his family by his elder brother Mohammad Saleem and brother-in-law Khalid. “After reaching this safer place, I looked back but there was no trace of my house.”
Riyaz, who sustained the fractures in a road accident three months ago, and his family are now in a small room provided by a neighbour, Mohammad Azam. “We hadn’t the time to bring anything with us,” his wife Yasmeen says. Even the clothes they are wearing have been provided by neighbours.
Relatives have brought rations. “No one from the government has visited us yet,” she says.
Riyaz, a welder, had shifted to Jammu from Surankote area of Poonch when militancy peaked there and young men his then age were being forcibly recruited. Once he settled in Jammu, he married Yasmeen and they have had two daughters followed by two sons, the four now aged 13 to 5. “Our school bags too have been washed away,” says Shabana, 12.
Waseem’s brother Saleem says, “After Saturday’s morning namaz at a mosque, I saw the swollen Tawi and immediately went on my scooter to Beli Charana, fearing the floodwaters may have entered Riyaz’s s house as it was in a low lying area.” Khalid, who followed him, says, “Riyaz and his family were still in the house and initially reluctant to leave. We brought them out forcibly and had hardly reached a higher, open space when a strong wave came and swept away their house and others.”
Riyaz had bought land some eight years ago and built the house. “Now we have no option but to move back to a rented house,” he says.
Over two dozen others including government officials have seen their houses washed away. All of them had settled in the area in the last eight to 15 years after buying the land from Gurjjars already settled there.
The area was initially part of the riverbed, then separated with the construction of a protection bund over the last few years. “The bund was raised with stones crates but was washed away like a sand wall in the floods,” says Mohammad Rafi, an MA student in Jammu University, who too lost his house.
Feroz Din, 50, spent the Saturday night in a government school at Satwari. He returned to Belicharana with his family on Sunday morning but found no trace of their home.
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