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The Bangus — paradise threatened

Praveen Swami

Tourism threatens to destroy one of Jammu and Kashmir’s most spectacular regions.

MUNIR AHMED flinches as he recalls the helicopter blades thrashing in the thin mountain air, their screaming engines sending livestock — and his children — scattering for cover into the forests. Back in the summer of 2003, two Lashkar-e-Taiba fidayeen had attacked Bravo Post, a military post on the Bangus — a sprawling high-altitude glacial plain in northern Kashmir that counts among the most spectacular jewels of the Himalayas. Five Indian Army troops we re killed in the suicide attack, and more than a dozen injured. Paradise, perched as it was on a key infiltration route from Pakistan to the Lashkar’s strongholds in the Rajwar forests, was a dangerous place.

Earlier this month, the helicopters were back on the Bangus plains, now bearing Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad. Since Azad’s visit, Rs.100 million has been committed to turning the Bangus into a major tourist draw. Orders have been issued to speed up work on a road that is being blasted through the 3,000-metre Neel Dori pass, which guards the entrance to the Bangus. Within four years, the State government hopes, the Bangus will be just a short drive from the town of Handwara — allowing thousands of tourists into the now-inaccessible region.

For Jammu and Kashmir’s jihad-ravaged tourism industry, the opening of Bangus is the best news in two decades. But for the Bangus’s sole residents — mountain herders who use the short Himalayan summer to graze their livestock on its riches — it could spell destruction.

Ever since he was a child, Mohammad Beigh has driven livestock on to the Bangus plains. Now 72, Beigh is the numberdar, or headman, of the 47 families from Kupwara’s Afrada village who spend their summers on Danna Behak — one of the clusters of log huts built by herders around the meadows.

Beigh’s annual journey to the Bangus survived the disruptions inflicted by three India-Pakistan wars and two decades of Islamist violence. But confronted with plans to transform the Bangus into a tourist attraction, the ageing shepherd is for the first time unsure just how many more years he will make the journey into the mountains.

“No one has spoken to us about the tourism project, but we have heard that people are going to come from Srinagar to build hotels,” he says. “Since we don’t actually own the land on which our huts are built or the pastures where our animals feed, we are afraid the government will one day take away our grazing rights. When tourists come here, they will not want their hotels to be surrounded by livestock and dung. People from the plains will profit, but we will loose what little we have.”

With no organised markets for the milk and ghee they produce, nor land rights, the Bangus herders have little to depend on but its extraordinary ecosystem.

Nine months of the year, the 300-square-kilometre Bangus is carpeted in up to 12 feet of snow. From the air, it resembles a giant bowl of powdered sugar. Neither animals nor people — bar the troops who cling on their positions in the face of arctic temperatures — interrupt the stillness of the Bangus winter.

In May, though, the ice gives way to a dense carpet of grasses and wild flowers, watered by the snow-melt and a profusion of streams running off the glaciers that surround it. Much of the Bangus plain is in fact a matted weave of grass and peat floating on water, which ripples underfoot.

No recent census has been conducted of the extraordinary migration that begins in the spring, but local residents say upwards of 50,000 buffaloes, cows, sheep, and horses are driven into the Bangus’ two major plains — the Bod or big, and Lokat or small. Some herders bring their own animals; others drive the livestock of better-off villagers, in return for 40 kilograms of grain. In the wake of the huge herds come predators like bears and leopards, as well as an incredible variety of birds.

Writing in 1895, the colonial administrator Walter Lawrence recorded that migration was driven by the fact that “cultivation has extended greatly, and there is little land for grazing.” “Each villager,” Lawrence said, “is obliged by custom to entrust his sheep to an appointed chaupan, or shepherd, and for each sheep the chaupan receives an appointed fee, which varies from two to three manwatas [1 kilogram] of shali [rice] or maize.”

Herders were — and remain — responsible for the livestock they take up the mountains. Even now, herders must produce the skins of animals claimed by predators. Should they fail to do so, herders must pay for the loss — or swear an oath at the small rock shrine of the Nanga Baba, an ancient mystic whose spiritual powers are reputed to have enabled him to survive the Bangus winter without clothes. “I was assured by several persons at Habar,” Lawrence wrote, “that a dishonest chaupan, some twenty years ago, passed under the elm tree of ordeal and came out blind.”

Jammu and Kashmir’s government insists the tourism project is not a new ordeal. Officials say they will help the herders to turn their own homes into tourist lodges — part of a larger policy intended to ensure local residents benefit from tourism. But Beigh’s son, Abdul Majid, is dismissive of these plans. “Who among us has the money to turn our little huts into hotels,” Majid asks. “Who among us has the money to buy a taxi, or open a restaurant? Who in Danna Behak even knows how to apply for a loan or keep accounts? None of us has studied past the sixth grade!”

Gujjar herders in Gulmarg, Majid points out, gained nothing from the pasture’s transformation into a major tourist resort. “People from Srinagar became millionaires because of Gulmarg,” he points out, “and the Gujjars who depended on it for their living became coolies.”

Peace ought to have brought dividends to the herders on the Bangus. Instead, the opening up of the valley to tourists has raised fears a penalty is being imposed. “Twenty years ago,” recalls Danna Behak elder Manga Khan, “there used to be a hundred or more mujahideen here. They would take our rations and our animals for food, and make us haul their ammunition into the mountains. Sometimes, they would harass our women. Still, we would come here every year, because we are poor people and the grass is free.”

In the wake of the Kargil war, the Indian Army set up permanent positions in the pastures, evicting the terrorists for whom the Bangus plains had become a training camp and base. If the tourism proposals go through, though, travel agents and hotel owners will be the real beneficiaries of the soldiers’ sacrifices — not the herders who they were brought in to protect. “Now there is peace,” says Khan, “the government wants to throw us out.”

Officials insist that this is not their intention. But the State government’s promises, local residents point out, would be more credible if the authorities had shown any concern for the mountain residents’ welfare. Last year, officials announced that part-time schoolteachers would accompany the herders into the mountains. Not a single school, though, has yet become operational in the Bangus. “I have to leave my children behind in Tanghdar when I come to the mountains,” says Phalaphati resident Mohammad Ashraf, “which means they are not learning the skills needed to tend the herds.”

Nor is a doctor available in case of medical emergencies. “The local army unit helps us as best it can,” says Mohammad Ashraf, who brings his herds up from the village of Dhanni, “but if someone is seriously ill, we have to carry them down to the plains. Elderly people and the very sick often do not survive.” Even the government veterinarians who accompany the herds on to the Bangus in the summer, herders complain, ask for stiff bribes to treat sick livestock.

Environmentalists are also concerned about the tourism plans. Sources in Jammu and Kashmir’s Ministry of Forests and Environment said no study had been conducted of the possible impact of tourism on the fragile Bangus ecosystem. Large-scale tourism has already led to a serious problem of plastic waste in Gulmarg, while the massive influx of Amarnath pilgrims has ravaged the once-stunning Lidder river valley. Officials say the construction of the Bangus road may also facilitate timber smuggling out of the valley, now near-impossible because of protective natural barrier provided by the steep Neel Dori pass.

Could the coming of peace end up destroying one of Jammu and Kashmir’s most spectacular regions? Sustainable eco-tourism, experience elsewhere in South Asia has demonstrated, is indeed possible. With good planning and community participation, tourism could benefit the Bangus’ residents. As things stand, though, there is no reason to believe this outcome is probable. Peace could pose just as much of a threat to the peoples of the Bangus as the grinding two-decade war they are just starting to emerge from.

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