Manas Ranjan Mahapatra, Puri, 9 April 2023
During my visit to Srinagar a decade ago, my colleague Dwijendra Kumar and I once stayed in a House Boat for one night. The condition was, apart from the bed ,the boat owner will provide us dinner and breakfast. The name of the House Boat was ‘Mughal E Azam’.
For dinner we got non-vegetarian food. Next morning, after breakfast, I was sitting on the deck. A small boat arrived. The boat owner was selling flowers. I saw from a distance that a post office, a bank ATM, a clinic, and a grocery shop were operating on the house boats.
The boat owner, Akbar, came and started a discussion. “We are fighting a war for the last 18 years, Sir.”
“Why and with whom?”, said I.
“Why, I don’t know. But it is between Hindustan and Pakistan”, Akbar said. Then he narrated his story. He had a shop in the Paharganj area in Delhi. Suddenly, the Kashmir problem began. People stopped coming to his shop. He was, for no fault of his, branded as a pro-terrorist and had to leave Delhi. His father had a House Boat in Dal Lake in Srinagar, which he gave to Akbar to start a new business.
But residents of Srinagar feared that he was an agent of Hindustan and didn’t trust him. It took five years for Akbar to prove that he is not an agent of Hindustan. His boat survived attacks by Pakistan-backed extremists from the valley too.
Indian security forces also didn’t trust him and his boat was always under surveillance. Nobody came to stay in his House Boat. He and his friends were economically ruined. It was CM Omar Abdullah who helped these poor boat owners for their economic rehabilitation. Now, he is also not there to extend his helping hand.
A decade has passed in the meantime. I was speaking last year to my good friend Dr. Aziz Hajini from Srinagar.
“How are you and our other friends including the boat owner, Akbar?”, I asked.
“We are in a mess. Many have lost their lives and livelihoods, including Akbar. Corona has failed to do much harm to us but Indo-Pak politics has killed us”, he replied with utter despair…..
