The big chill

Then came the sound, a low rumble of thunder from high above the mountain, and a massive wall of snow plunged into Waltengonar. Like a thick winding sheet, it enveloped the village, smothering, asphyxiating, freezing, turning it into an instant graveyard.

Within seconds, more than 200 had perished. Scores more would freeze to death by the time the first help8212;a motley bunch of armymen and villagers from neighbouring hamlets8212;came 28 hours later. More than a week and several thousand official help promises later, hundreds are still missing, buried under mounds of snow.

WHITE NOISE
FOR once, the colour of death in Kashmir isn8217;t red. And the government has been quick in blaming the heavens. But there is more to the tragedy of Waltengonar than bad weather conditions: There is a paralytic government that spends the winter in the warmth of the Jammu plains, leaving behind the entire population of Kashmir to the mercy of an inert bureaucracy.

The first policemen reached Waltengonar after two days and immediately set got down to work: counting the dead and updating their bosses. Search and rescue operations were not their priority.

8216;8216;The first people to come in from outside were a group of armymen and villagers from the neighbourhood,8217;8217; says Master Bashir Ahmad, 55, who lost 22 members of his family and a three-storey house in the snow tsunami. 8216;8216;They came after more than 28 hours, on Sunday afternoon.8217;8217;

Ahmad said he and the few other survivors spent two days and a long night helplessly waiting for their own end.

8216;8216;It was around 12.30 pm. I was walking towards the cowshed when I heard this strange sound. I looked up and saw the mountain coming down like a huge white wall,8217;8217; says Ahmad. 8216;8216;Within seconds, everything was gone. My house was no longer there, I didn8217;t even see the rubble. It was all gone, the entire village. There was just snow everywhere. We didn8217;t know what to do.8217;8217;

Two villagers, Kouba Khan and Shabir, heroically decided to get help from the nearest village, five km down the slope of the plateau. Miraculously, they reached the village and found the phone lines working.

8216;8216;But the Qazigund police didn8217;t believe us,8217;8217; says villager Khursheed Ahmad Bhat, who put through the call. 8216;8216;They the police told us, 8216;You are lying8217;.8217;8217;

The villagers then approached the nearby army post, where officers despatched a small platoon to Waltengonar. 8216;8216;We rescued five people. They were injured and we carried them back to my village on our shoulders,8217;8217; says Bhat. 8216;8216;But there was no medical help, and the road to Qazigund was buried under the snow. We tried our level best but they died.8217;8217;

LINE OF NO CONTROL
IT would be three days before a snow-puller put in an an appearance to clear the road connecting the village to the Srinagar-Jammu national highway. But rescue operations remained clogged with inefficiency. With no senior officer to delegate and direct, the few revenue and police officials who made it to Waltengonar preferred to hang about instead of taking charge, say villagers.

As they watched, the number of volunteers8212;residents of neighbouring villages8212;grew as did the demand for shovels, as survivors desperately tried to dig out their dear ones with their bare hands. Gradually, though the bodies began piling up in the half-a-dozen underground shacks that had survived the avalanche.

8216;8216;We have lost hope of any survivors. But we want to give our dead a decent burial,8217;8217; says a distraught Bashir Ahmad Chechi, 32, who lost most of his family in the tragedy. 8216;8216;We can live on a piece of bread but please help us to dig out our dead. Don8217;t tell us to wait for summer, when the snow will melt.8217;8217;

The deputy commissioner and his team of officers, meanwhile, sat in an emergency control room, 40 km away in Qazigund. The chief minister and his team did an aerial survey and promised more money as aid.

ROAD RAGE
NOT long ago, Waltengonar was the perfect Kashmir picture postcard: a scenic village nestled deep in mighty Himalayas. Today, its mass graves and mass grief represent the fine line between beauty and calamity.

It also exposes the pace of government response, both in Srinagar and at the Centre, to a disaster in a state which is regularly cited as a cornerstone of India8217;s political sovereignty and geographical integrity.

The Srinagar-Jammu highway8212;the only physical link and supply line connecting the Valley to the rest of the country8212;seems to have been formally abandoned to the whims of the weather. A few hours of rain and snow are all it takes for the road to shut down; till date, there are no prospects of immediate repair to the many patches that were ripped away completely by avalanches.

Experts have long highlighted Kashmir8217;s complete dependence on the highway and the need to look for alternatives. But nothing has happened on that front, nor has there been a serious effort to stock of quota of essentials in the Valley.

As a result, not just isolated Waltengonar, but even capital Srinagar is victim to the caprices of the weather. While residents rush to hoard cooking gas, kerosene and other essentials, the power, too, is playing truant since all three transmission lines that feed electricity into the Valley have been damaged.

ESSENTIAL ISSUES
WHEN winter snow is hardly unexpected in Kashmir, the shortage of essential commodities8212;particularly fuel products8212;is truly baffling. The state government blames the shortage on the three national companies in charge of the fuel needs of Kashmir.

8216;8216;It is mandatory for them to have stocks for at least 45 days. But their reserves dried up within a week,8217;8217; says a senior state official.

But when asked that about the role of the Director, Food and Supplies8212;the state government pointsman coordinating the supply and storage of fuel products with the national companies8212;the official says that the government will probe his shortcomings once the crisis ends.

In fact, the Jammu and Kashmir government8217;s poor response to this heavy snowfall was demonstrated in almost every alley of Srinagar city. Despite the presence of 34 snow-clearance machines, the army had to be called in to clear roads between city localities to hospitals. There were umpteen instances of people manually ferrying the ill to hospitals, only to find doctors absent. Electricity remained disconnected from the major city hospitals for days together.

The worst part is that none of it was unforeseen: G K Mohanty, director of Srinagar8217;s Meteorological Office, had warned the government about the possibilities of heavy snowfall several days in advance.