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Breathless at Battal Balian

Belching fumes: Industrial units near the camp.

The road winds up from Jammu, broad and clean, flanked by shady trees on either side. The air is still and through the windows of the car all looks well in God’s world. Till the car suddenly takes a turn, crashing as it would seem into the gree n foliage. A road hidden from the eyes of the world takes us to the Batal Balian Kashmiri migrant camp. Located near Udhampur, 95 km from Jammu, this place is home for some 2,000 people of India’s largest displaced community — the Kashmiri Pandits.

“Migrant” conjures up images of people moving wilfully, if unhappily, from their native places to others in search of greener pastures. But when you talk to 70-year-old Mayawati, you hear that the migration was not so much for greener pastures as it was for safer havens. In her broken Hindi — she still struggles with the language, turning to her son for help every now and then in Kashmiri — she recounts the rumours, the threats, the sudden spurt of killings of Kashmiri Pandits like her, the messages over the mosque, and finally the sudden, heavy hearted decision to leave. Yet, leave she did, even though it was not easy at the age of 53 — that was how old she was when she came here in 1990. Why, they all knew they would soon go back, as soon as the trouble was over. And that was how Mayawati found herself with her family — husband, two sons and a daughter-in-law — here in Battal Balian “migrant camp”.

And though it was all painful and uncomfortable, they put up with it all. There were other families too. It was temporary, they comforted each other. Soon, the tents concretised into hutments. And even as the country celebrates its 60th year of independence, Mayawati, her family and neighbours mark their 17th year in exile here. Her hutment, where the entire family is squeezed in, is lined with Hindu deities. On the walls hang two old, faded posters of Pahalgam and Sonmarg. She proudly points to her five-year-old granddaughter, lying asleep beside her on the floor. Her husband, deaf and suffering from asthma, sits silently in a corner. Here, in the isolation of Batal Balian, Mayawati is one of the more fortunate ones. She has her family around her.

Brijnath, 70, fled here with his wife and son from his native Bijbihara, where he was engaged in agriculture. The atmosphere of fear that had built up in their village in Kashmir before their departure, together with the trauma of flight, uncertainty and camp life caused high levels of stress and diabetes in his wife. Two years after their arrival here, she died of cardiac arrest. Brijnath himself suffers from ulcers in the stomach and acute asthma. Dr. K.L. Chowdhury, Director of the Shriya Bhatt Hospital and Research Centre, Jammu, recounted that more than a thousand persons died of heat stroke alone in the very first year of exodus. The Centre is actively involved in health work with the displaced community.

Displacement follows a familiar pattern. It is always the weaker, the more vulnerable who are displaced. Most of the inmates here came from rural areas in Kashmir, engaged in agriculture or in petty business. Once displaced, the displaced invariably suffer other oppressions. As the population here battled unfamiliar surroundings and hostile climatic conditions, they faced problems of unemployment and livelihood. Government rations and doles are humiliating, even insufficient, but accepted silently, with heads down. Gradually realisation dawned — this was not a temporary phase, this was becoming home. Cut off, isolated—it takes almost an hour to get to Udhampur and more than two to Jammu — they have nowhere to turn to for even emergency needs. Veena Kaul recalls when she had a premature delivery and no transport was available at the camp to take her to the hospital in Jammu the night she suddenly had an emergency. There are not even any markets close by, the residents are brought food and fruits and medicines every week by community volunteers from Jammu.

Soon, other scripts crept in to the narrative. In 2000, the entire area around the camp was declared an industrial zone. Even though the Government had housed a camp here of more than 2,000 people, this was not deemed a matter of concern. Neither was there any thought of first moving the camp and then allowing the industries to come up. And so, before anyone could comprehend what was happening, nine industrial units producing cements, bricks and plastics, sprang up around the camp, with their fumes and effluent causing a stranglehold on the environment, polluting it to dangerous levels. Some of the dwelling quarters are a mere 33 feet away from the factories. With them, a deluge of respiratory, olfactory and skin diseases engulfed the camp.

The tranquillity and serene beauty of the green-shrouded hills are yet another deception that greet you here. But soon a steady drone takes over. Life begins early in this camp, people like to drink and store clean water. As Gugadevi, 45, shows me, once the factories start churning, a white haze envelopes the camp and thick sediments form on the water. Yet, there is acute shortage of electricity here and some of the hutments that have holes which pass for windows have to keep them open for the little ventilation it offers — even if it means breathing in the dust. What else can one do when the temperature is above forty degrees Centigrade?

And that is how 30 per cent of the inmates here, like Brijnath, now find themselves patients of asthma and bronchitis. Those above 60 years, like Mohan Lal Kaul or Roopavati need nebulizers and oxygen often. But others like Lovely, 14, and Manoj, 10, also suffer from acute asthma. Gugadevi’s younger son Kush has continuous mucous running from his nose, thanks to the industrial zone. Yet, this is not the end of Battal Balian’s woe.

In a medical camp conducted by the Shriya Bhat Centre earlier this year, Dr. Khosa, a leading dermatologist of Jammu, found that almost 50 per cent of the inmates were afflicted with some kind of skin ailment caused by environmental injury to skin. Most of the afflicted, like Dazzy Bhat and Manesh Dhar, whose condition is acute, trace it as a direct fall-out of the industries that encircle the camp.

Further medical tests revealed that 18 per cent of the inmates are suffering from deafness and 15 per cent from eye problems — all due to environmental pollution of noise, dust fumes and toxic waste from the same source.

While people here seemed to be paying the price for their proximity to the camp, Nanaji, a senior camp inmate and volunteer, laments that not a single inmate had benefited by getting a job at any of these factories. While 150 of the 300 employable men are without jobs, the State has yet to announce an employment package!

For these men and women, images of Kashmir are fading in the distance, dreams of returning home to verdant valleys and clear gurgling streams are becoming just that — dreams. Life here is now a struggle for basic survival. The people of Battal Balian have approached all the powers that be — from the Pollution Control Board and Deputy Commissioner of Udhampur to Farouq Abdullah, Mufti Mohamed Syed and Chief Minister Azad. A request had also been sent to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. All they have received are promises that the camp would soon be shifted to safer environs — promises that are yet to materialise. When contacted by this writer, the Relief Commissioner (Migrant), Vinod Kaul, responded that quarters were being completed near Jammu and the Battal Balian camp would be shifted there by the end of this year. But the breathless in Battal Balian are not buying that — not yet.

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