Paddy harvest keeps protesters away

Azhar Qadri

Tribune News Service

Bandipora, September 27

Outside the western edge of Srinagar, a potholed road leads to Bandipora — one of the three districts that make up the north Kashmir region. On both sides of the road on Tuesday, the 81st day of the unrest, men and women are busy in fields harvesting paddy crop.

It is a scene that replicates all along the road up to Kralpora and Bankoot, the last villages located on the foot of a mountain range circling Bandipora’s northern rim and cutting it off from the remote Gurez region.

The 80-km stretch to the picturesque last villages of Bandipora is quiet, abandoned by the protesters who had made the daytime travel almost impossible a fortnight ago. Most of them have gone to the fields, where crops have turned golden and are ready for harvesting.

The harvesting season, which began this month, has kept many protesters busy and diminished the intensity of protests. The districts of south Kashmir, which has been the heartland of the ongoing unrest, and north Kashmir, remains heavily invested in horticulture and agriculture — the mainstay of the rural economy.

Ghulam Mohidin, a former government official and a resident of Bankoot, said paddy harvesting involves almost all villagers. “It is unlike apple harvesting. Apple orchards are owned by only a few in a village while almost everyone in a village has paddy crop,” he said.

The shops in the sleepy Bankoot were shut like everywhere else. The road entering Bandipora town, which has witnessed regular clashes between protesters and police, remained blocked with stones but there were no protesters.

Bandipora is one of the three districts that make up north Kashmir, a frontier region where several civilians have been killed during the ongoing unrest. A civilian was killed in Bandipora district on Eid-ul-Azha earlier this month.

A senior government official in the district said the crackdown launched by police on protesters in recent weeks has made an impact. Almost 100 people have been arrested and more than 30 have been booked under the Public Safety Act.

“The last 10 days have been peaceful, very few incidents,” the official said. “It may be because of the harvesting, but also possibly because of the crackdown,” he said.

At Kralpora, where a major hydroelectricity project is underway, construction has come to a halt since the unrest began 13 weeks ago. A policeman guarding the construction site said the workers had returned a few days ago but that triggered a protest by the locals.

In the late afternoon, as sun began to settle behind mountains, a group of women marched on a road near Gamroo village, carrying a black and white photograph of militant Burhan Wani whose killing in a gunfight on July 8 had sparked the unrest. The women, singing ‘we shall overcome’, were the only protesters on the road.