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The Story of the Kashmir Welfare Trust
This is the story of the earthquake
On the Indian side of the divided state the people of the Kashmir Valley live in a place that has been longed for, and fought for by every invader who has passed through it. There is good reason why this place has been wrapped around in hyperbole for thousands of years, a high valley that seems a soft fertile mirage of a place set amongst the ragged peaks that surround it, physically cutting it off from the world.
The Valley is part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the Kashmir region controversially divided between India and Pakistan by the disputed Line of Control. A large part of the tension between these two countries centres on the unresolved issue of which one should have Kashmir. The people of the Valley dream of Azadi, freedom, of being a separate place, a mountain buffer zone between India and Pakistan, a place that could trade freely with both and create its own micro economy.
For almost twenty years the people of Kashmir have been trying to live their lives in an environment of fear and violence caused by a separatist movement and the draconian Indian military response to that movement. It is an on-going situation.
During Ramadan of 2005, on 8th October, the first Saturday of the fast, people were resting in the morning after early prayers. It meant that most were in their homes with their families around them.
At 8.50 a.m. on the Pakistani side of the Line of Control, and so at 9.20 a.m. on the Indian side, the earth opened up to a depth of ten kilometres.
It was an earthquake measuring between 7.6 and 7.7 on the Richter scale, the same level of ferocity as in San Francisco in 1906, the earthquake that changed building regulations in so many fault line areas of the world, though not all. The official number given for those killed in the 2005 earthquake, a few weeks afterwards, would have almost exactly filled the Olympic Stadium in Beijing in 2008, 80,000. That number continued to swell by further thousands throughout the winter. An estimated 3.3 million people were made homeless, and 8 million people’s lives were affected. The destruction was said to have been intensified by the severity of the earth’s upthrust, and by the poor standards of construction in affected areas.
When a friend described it to me later he was standing beside me on the back veranda of the houseboat where I stay in Kashmir. With his legs wide, he wove from one side to the other, making the whole houseboat shift in the water as he swung from side to side.
‘This is how it was, but not this, many times this. I was standing just somewhere near here, just there.’ He pointed to the corner of the veranda. ‘I thought it was someone playing a game, jumping on the mooring lines to make the boat go like this. I was confused by this thing as well because it was early, the time people are relaxing a little after prayers. But no one was there, and then it became so bad, the whole of the lake shaking about and things shooting up from the water. The others on the houseboats were calling out to me. We knew that this was not a usual tremble, that this was a very bad thing.’
In Kashmir, as in any fault line region, there are tremors all the time. People barely stop for what they call ‘the shivering’, and if they do it is just to look up to see if anything is crashing down from above: masonry, laundry, flower-pots from sills. People have been killed by things falling from the sky, not often, but it has happened, and so some people still look up before carrying on. If the tremors happen during the night people sleep through them, or, if they are awake they put out a hand to steady the glass of water beside their bed, or gather up a child who is not yet used to the fact that they have been born in a place that shudders.
On 8 October 2005 it was different. Even though the epicentre of the earthquake was seventy-seven miles away, the people of Srinagar knew that their world had ruptured again.
Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, was at the epicentre. While many were resting in their homes, children were at school, Saturday being another full school day in most of South Asia. In engineering terms the city suffered total structural failure. The majority of its buildings were built of large unreinforced concrete blocks. It is one of the cheapest methods of building, and the Central Pakistan Government has always tried to save money in its administration of this part of Kashmir. Most of the government buildings, such as schools and hospitals, had been built this way. Sixty per cent of these buildings collapsed, causing the highest loss of life.
Srinagar managed to escape without large-scale destruction, because so many of the city’s older houses had been built during a time of more careful craftsmanship that had made allowances for the shifting nature of the mountains.
But 500 miles away from the epicentre, in Delhi, buildings split and fell. In Kabul, 250 miles in the other direction, the shuddering was strong, though the shield of the high Karakoram ranges absorbed most of the shock before it reached the Afghan capital. In contrast the fault line runs down directly from Muzaffarabad into the plains and to the Indian capital. Tower blocks fell in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, 200 miles from the destruction in the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Whole villages in north Pakistan disappeared, flattened in the first upthrust, buried under landslides, or their cracks opened up more slowly in the wave of more than 1,000 aftershocks that followed, some measuring up to 6.2 on the Richter scale. Many of those trying to dig people out in the immediate aftermath were crushed under further collapsing buildings as the aftershocks came and came.
As those who had not been crushed emerged into the dust and chaos some thought at first that it had been a nuclear attack, that finally the fragile peace between India and Pakistan had broken. Pakistan’s leader in the 1970s, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had boasted to the world that his people would eat grass in order to become a nuclear power. Governments had creamed money from the domestic budget to keep pace with India’s nuclear programme. In both countries public building projects in some of the highest risk earthquake areas in the world had been put up without proper foundations and without reinforcement, undermined by both corruption and a lack of public funding. It was a natural disaster but the worst of its devastation was man-made.
Looking across Nagin Lake from a houseboat
Village houses ruined by earthquake
Srinagar’s skyline
With a widow of the earthquake beside a house we were building for her
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