Shells, snipers and death: What children in J&K border villages live with

Treva, Jammu: When child rights activist Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai were announced joint winners of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, four hundred children sat huddled in a cramped space inside a school building in a dusty border town in RS Pura. No, they weren’t attending a lecture or a usual school morning assembly. As the world celebrated a child rights activist and a child activist, these children in one corner of Jammu and Kashmir, close to the line of control were hiding in a school building, clinging on to dear life. As cross-border firing intensified with the Pakistani Army aggressively shelling Indian outposts, these children in the border village of our country were ripped away from their books, schools and normal lives. They now are struggling for breathing space in the single-storied Salehsar high school in RS Pura. [caption id=“attachment_1754553” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Kuldeep is being treated for serious splinter injuries in a Jammu hospital. Firstpost.[/caption] “We can’t go to school, our house was completely damaged when a mortar shell landed inside. All my belongings, including my school bag got destroyed in it,” Siya Chawhan, 13, a seventh standard student from Treva village, 500 meters from the International Border, told Firstpost on Friday. Following the relentless ceasefire violations that began on 5 October, very few people have chosen to stay back in Treva. Most of them have abandoned their houses and some visit their houses for a few hours in a day, only to return to migrant camps set up outside the village and away from the range of firing. If you walk down its winding roads you spot a broken window pane occasionally, a run down wall here and there. An eerie calm envelops the village. Surav Singh, 15, is one of the few people who haven’t left the village. He lives in their house with his grandfather.  Four members of his family, including his mother and two sisters, were injured on 6 October and are being treated in a hospital. Singh says that a shell landed inside their kitchen crashing in through the ceiling.  A gaping hole in the ceiling stands witness of the troubled times the family is going through. When this correspondent visited him on Friday, Singh, a ninth standard student in a local school, stood on the terrace his house, staring at a Pakistani watch-tower on the horizon as a red National Conference (NC) party flag fluttered in the wind in one corner of the terrace. A deep gash on his left wrist catches the eye immediately as Singh turns to talk to us. “We are trapped between the soldiers of two nations and our lives depend on their mood. The firing is part of our daily lives. On really bad days they fire mortar shells,, on others snipers train their guns on us," Singh said, his voice betraying anxiety. “All my books are destroyed and I can’t even go to school now until this firing stops completely,” Singh says in a hushed up tone. On the fourth floor of the Government Medical College (GMC) in Jammu, among a dozen patients being treated for splinter injuries, lies the most critical patient Kuldeep Kumar, with multiple splinter injuries on his abdomen. On 8 October, Kumar along with his mother were brought to the hospital from Chalriya, one of the worst affected villages. A mortal shell had landed inside his house killing two members of his family. Later, his mother succumbed to her injuries in the hospital. “I can’t feel my abdomen and my legs, and I want to see my mother,” he says with tears in his eyes. The sharp escalation in the number of ceasefire violations along the India-Pakistan border has taken a serious toll on the lives of children who live in villages along the border. Sharif Bhat, state program manger of Save the Children, warns that the children won’t recover from the trauma easily. He said that apart from parental support, they would need to undergo prolonged counselling sessions. “We will be running winter tuition classes for these children and will be providing them with educations kits, but our operations are only limited to Rajouri amd Poonch,” he told Firstpost on phone from Srinagar. Ayesha Aziz, a child rights activist in Jammu, says, “All that these children want is peace to prevail, so that they could also live a normal life like children do in other parts of the country.”