In Jammu’s refugee camps, families who fled cross-border shelling fear that peace will never return

On February 6, the government middle school in Naushera was packed long after school hours. Mattresses were spread out on the bare cement floors of a room lit by a single bulb. The platforms in front of blackboards were now doing duty as kitchens and dining spaces. The walls were covered with soot.

Naushera is in Jammu’s Rajouri district, close to the Line of Control. At least 25 families have been camped in the school since May last year, when cross-border shelling between India and Pakistan intensified. In January alone, eight Indian civilians were killed and 58 injured in 192 breaches of the ceasefire agreement between the nations. In the Naushera school, five families share a single dimly lit and damp classroom with no partitions for privacy. All share a single washroom. The classrooms have no heating equipment to ward off the bitter winter cold and residents get only enough firewood to keep the cooking stoves going.

This is one of the three schools in Naushera town that have been converted into refugee camps as residents of villages along the Line of Control fled the mortar shelling. The residents of these camps get weekly rations of rice and wheat but with little work available, vegetables and pulses are becoming unattainable. “In skirmishes between India and Pakistan, we are being squashed and humiliated,” said 35-year-old Ashok Kumar, a resident of Sariya village, which lies in Indian territory that spill out beyond the border fencing. Kumar is a labourer but now he idles away most of his time in the camp.

According to the district commissioner in Rajouri, at least 160 families are living in these camps. Basking in the sun with his six-year-old son, Kumar said that this was the fourth time in the last two years that he has moved to this camp and did not feel safe enough to return home. “We have a bunker that was built in 2002,” he said. “We are not even sure if it is safe to use anymore.”

Going to school

Residents of the border areas say their lives have been uprooted with each displacement. Children have been particularly affected by the border upheavals.

In the middle school camp, refugee children study with the local students. Lessons are held in the lawns as the classrooms remain occupied. But camp residents say that their children lag behind in studies and pine for their old teachers and classmates.

“Our children are unable to study or keep up with the lessons taught there,” said 30-year-old Chinta Devi, who lives in the camp with her three children. “They remain disturbed, we send them to keep them occupied.” Only a game of cricket on the school grounds and the single television set in the camp gives the children some solace.

Life on the move

A little more than a kilometre from the middle school, a larger camp has been set up in the government-run higher secondary school. Here too, multiple families have been allotted single classrooms to live in with no partitions. In a corner of one of the classrooms, 48-year-old Ashok Kumar runs a small makeshift shop. Kumar fled Jhangar village, bisected by the border fence, after his home and shops were damaged in last May’s shelling.

Kumar said his family has never been able to settle down. In 1947, his father migrated from the territories taken over by Pakistan into what became India. But since then, the family has been displaced several times by the bouts of shelling during wars and times of heightened tension between India and Pakistan.

After spending nearly a year in the camp, Kumar remains sceptical of when or if he will be able to go home. Expenses on repairing damaged property have broken Kumar and many others financially. “I am as dejected as my father was in 1947 after coming to this side and still not finding peace,” he said. “Most of us have loans to repay. Even if we go back, the banks won’t let us live now. Our loans are only multiplying. My life’s savings are gone, I am tired now.”

Lying on cold floors

As the uncertainty over their return grows, residents of the camps are becoming increasingly restive. Sushma Devi has made several requests to have the bare cement floors in her allotted classroom to be covered, but to no avail. She alleges discrimination by those who have taken charge of the camp’s affairs.

Being unemployed, Devi barely manages to feed her two children. “We can’t even afford bus fares,” she said. “The government gives us rice but how do we buy oil, vegetables, and firewood?” As dusk approached, residents gathered in the hallways to warm themselves near the earthen stoves used by the women to cook dinner. “The old and children fall sick due to the cold as the floors have not been covered,” Sushma Devi said.

Families moving to the camp left behind farms and livestock. Now, each of these families have sent one or two members back to the villages to tend to the animals. Weary with repeated displacements, they refuse to move back into their homes.

Lal Chand, a 55-year-old migrant in the high school camp, said that residents had initially refused to be evacuated even after the shelling intensified. But now that they were in the camp, he said, migrants were not hopeful that there would ever be peace and so did not want to go back.

“We can’t settle ever,” he said. “Whatever we build gets destroyed. Its as if they [Pakistan] wait for us to rebuild our lives before destroying it again.” After a while, he said, “man mar jata hai” – I am shattered.

‘Rightful demand’

Sixty eight-year-old Sita Ram voiced the demand of many migrants. The government should allocate plots to each family to rebuild their homes away from the border, Ram said. It should also provide with monetary relief of the kind given to the Kashmiri Pandits who fled the Kashmir Valley in the 1990s, after militancy spread there.

At the middle school camp, Ashok Kumar is adamant about not leaving the camp before his “rightful demands” were met: land for relocation and monetary assistance.