Is Our Existence on the Line of Control a Crime?
Suhail Khan
Bandipora, Nov 02: A heavy silence of grief has settled on Chorwan village in Gurez. For the families here, the 35 cattle that strayed across the border were never just livestock. They were the beating heart of their households and the sole guarantor of their children’s futures. Now they are gone.
“Who will listen to our story of pain? Maybe no one. Or maybe our only crime is that we live on the Line of Control,” said Ghulam Qadir (name changed). His voice broke as he sat with a group of heartbroken villagers.
What is our fault? he asked. We have endured a life of hardship, clinging to the hope that our children might know something better. Those cattle were our everything. They were our only support. Now that they are gone, where do we turn? We are trapped in a place where even our screams are swallowed by the wind. Is it because we live here along this line that we must suffer so?
The loss of these 35 animals is not a small setback. It is the seizure of a lifeline. Why are you tearing away our only support? cried another local, Farooq Ahmad (name changed). His words were filled with a helplessness born of being ignored. “These animals are our lives. They are our income, our food, and our only thread to survival. Without them, what becomes of us? How do we look into our children’s hungry eyes?”
Another resident surrounded by the somber faces of his neighbors laid bare their stark reality. We are poor people. We have nothing else in this world but these cattle. His appeal was a direct, desperate plea to both governments of Inida and Pakistan. We beg you to return what is ours. Do not take the very reason we wake each morning.
“We have knocked on every door, from our MLA Nazir Ahmad Khan to every local official we could find. Yet our cries hit a wall of silence,” he stated. “We are fed empty promises and left with nothing but our fading hope.”
“No one sees our suffering,” the villagers said. Their collective spirit is crumbling. “The situation has grown so bleak that even our own village headman turns away. We have no one. We live only by God’s mercy, forgotten people on a forgotten piece of land.”
We have nothing else. We beg the government to see us, hear us, and help us reclaim our lives. Please help us save ourselves. Help us get back our cattle. They are our income, our reason for living, and our only hope for survival.
Meanwhile, the villagers, already reeling from a loss they say happened in July this year, have appealed beyond local representatives to Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha. They urge them to make diplomatic efforts for the return of their livestock.
