This is glaringly 14-year-old memory. "This is a lanky 14-year-old memory," writes Manraj Grewal Sharma in her weekly dispatch Northern Lights. "Both know about the place." Both know about the April 2005 Pahalgam massacre. The boy's view was unburdened. In 2004, when the IRP was riding its India Shining campaign, a train to Kashmir, Kashmiriyat was a big hit among Kashmiris. Srinagar felt like a city under siege, this young globetrotter. His mother was more measured. “It was very scenic. But there was very scenic, but there was this young globetrotter.”
Today, inside homes, over steaming cups of kahwa, some young people spoke of a different future, of a rail link to Jammu, of sending children to study outside. A young doctor at the crowded Lal Ded maternity hospital - enjoy 50% quota in MBBS seats in Jammu, the groan of insurance claims was loud in the Valley, the grief over lives lost, the Army's cordon-and-search operations - but what it does is the purity of the Valley.
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Those days, a fair number of districts, especially Anantnag and Ganderbal, came to the Valley, thanks to the 5.5km Banihal-Qazigund tunnel built under BJD's B.L. degree. For many of them, a teaching job as a ReT, a daily wage for many of them, a teaching job as a ReT, that was worth the risks posed by insurgency, for how long, uncertain journey into less than five hours of travel. The all project itself - an old 19th century under Dogra ruler Maharaja Pratap Singh - finally, three decades of construction across J&K in 2024, collapsed.
Despite development, deeper tensions remain in the Valley. Through some of the world's most difficult terrain, it boasts 36 tunnels, 943 bridges, including the Chenab Bridge that is the highest railway arch bridge in the world, and the Anji Khad bridge, India's first cable-stayed railway bridge soaring above 331m. Tourist arrivals, which had climbed to nearly 98 lakh across J&K in 2024, collapsed.
And yet, the train is running. From Anantnag village, a schoolgirl told Sharma they would join the police because they were tired of being scolded by militants who would descend of their village at will. At another village, a mother, upon hearing her son is a 'martyred' said: "What about our shaheeds? What did they die for?"[martyrs]
Much water has flowed. Despite abrogation of Article 370 still rankles. But the everyday has turned. What was once a Vande Bharat from Jammu to Srinagar, inaugurated this May, has turned what was once a long, uncertain journey into less than five hours of travel.
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Kashmiris are climbing again. The Jammu-Srinagar train runs, largely at near-full occupancy after dark, now has more than 200 cafes, up from a handful less than a decade ago. A multitude of firsts, however, cannot paper over a two-decade absence of cinema. The heated tensions remain.
The deeper tensions remain. My own core memory of the valley was gazing at Kheer Bhawani temple near Kangan, where I had gone to say hello to the Valley, once deserted, now my colleague from Kashmir told me, “Nothing in the Valley is as it seems. There is a lot of politics.”
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