Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir — Forty-year-old Ruksana wails as she looks at her home, a desolate one-storey structure stripped of windows and doors next to the raging Tawi river in Jammu’s rundown neighbourhood of Gujar Nagar. A coarse coating of mud drips down the outer walls of the house.

“My husband is handicapped, and I have built this home by working at people’s homes,” she wails. “I could only rescue my two children and husband. Everything else, their clothes, their books, food has been lost.”

For dozens of families, the loss is even graver. At least 40 people have died and scores have been injured as torrential rains in Indian-administered Kashmir triggered major landslides this week, with flash floods sweeping away homes and knocking down telecommunication networks and powerlines.

The majority of those killed were pilgrims travelling to the Vaishno Devi temple in Jammu’s Katra. The shrine, one of the most popular Hindu pilgrimage spots, is located about 60km from Jammu city. Devotees trek about 12–13km uphill from the base camp to reach it.

“There was chaos. Death had never seemed [so] close. Some people are still missing,” said Rakesh Kumar, 42, who had come to Katra from Madhya Pradesh, a central Indian state. “The internet and phones were dead, which created a lot of panic.”

Jammu recorded its heaviest-ever 24-hour rainfall on Tuesday – 380mm, compared with the previous record of 270.4mm in 1988 – triggering widespread devastation across the region. Some of the deceased pilgrims visiting the Vaishno Devi shrine have been identified as residents of Punjab, Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh states.

‘We hope they are alive’

Mohan Das, another devotee from the state of Uttar Pradesh, said that he was looking for five friends who were missing. “We don’t know where they are. It has been 12 hours since we last saw them,” Das said.

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Jammu abuts the mountains that girdle the Kashmir Valley. The latest crisis came days after a series of flash floods in the remote regions of Kishtwar and Kathua districts killed dozens in Indian-administered Kashmir.

The regional administration has set up relief camps and announced compensation for affected families. The region’s Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and the federally appointed Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha have toured the worst-hit areas. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised the central government’s assistance, and the authorities said they evacuated more than 5,000 people stranded in the floods.

In Jammu, the floods surged through the city and swept away bridges on the Tawi, a major lifeline for the region. Images showed policemen in Jammu desperately trying to halt traffic approaching a damaged bridge before a side of it collapsed.

Along the steep mountainous routes that trace a winding path through the craggy hills of Jammu, roads caved in under landslides, forcing the only land route from the rest of India to the region to shut temporarily. The Indian government also mobilised a fleet of military transport aircraft to fast-track the delivery of aid and other essential supplies into the region, where air traffic was closed on Tuesday before operations resumed the following day.

‘Waters close in on Kashmir’

Bashash Mahmood, 23, a university law student, was abruptly awakened by a midnight call while sleeping at his hotel in Srinagar. On the line was his cousin, calling from Anantnag—58 kilometres away.

Floodwaters on Wednesday knocked down mobile and electricity towers and severed optical fibre cables, crippling the region’s entire telecommunications infrastructure.

So Bashash could only hear a jumble of crackling words as he tried to make sense of what his cousin was saying. He finally managed to catch an urgent SOS message: floodwaters had surged outside his home in Bijbehara, Anantnag, and his family was in danger.

He took his car and raced along empty roads in the middle of the night, past the Indian army garrison at Badambagh, and through the sprawling saffron fields of Pampore.

When he arrived at Sangam, a canyon where two major rivers in Anantnag join, he rolled down his windows, the rain pelting against his face. “I realised that water had risen dangerously close to the embankment.”

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Once he reached home, Bashash got to work and carried household items such as a fridge, furniture and utensils to the second storey of their house, emptying the ground floor.

In the morning, videos went viral showing people paddling rafts through the streets, as water had submerged large parts of South Kashmir, especially Anantnag district.

In Srinagar, the region’s biggest city, panic reached a crescendo on Wednesday afternoon – reinforced by public memories of apocalyptic floods that had struck in 2014.

Back then, floodwaters from swollen rivers had breached the banks, burying large parts of the Kashmir valley. As Bashash recalls, when the waters finally receded 11 years ago, the floods had left two feet of sludge residue that locals scooped up with their bare hands before cleaning their homes to make them livable again. “Just the thought of how hard it was for us to defecate terrifies me. We would rather refuse to eat anything to get ourselves constipated because there were no toilets,” he says.

Haunted by those memories, residents across Kashmir were seen assembling sandbags and plugging gaps to prevent breaches through which the swelling river might come. If it was the Tawi in Jammu, it was the Jhelum river – also a lifeline-turned-threat – that poses the danger in Kashmir. The river crisscrosses its way through the entire length of the Kashmir valley before crossing over into Pakistan.

Echoes of 2014, pain of 2019

On Wednesday, residents rushed to relocate or move their household goods to higher storeys in their homes in a bid to avoid a repeat of 2014. The family of Nazir Wani, a 70-year-old man suffering from a chronic pulmonary disorder that requires him to continuously have oxygen connected, said they were moving to a different neighbourhood, some 14km away, at a higher altitude.

“Where would we go if the waters rise and we get stuck? Where will we get the oxygen supply from? We are not taking any chances,” said Nousheen Wani, his daughter. The family bundled the old man into a large sports car, his eyebags sagging, as he took heavy breaths. They hauled five cylinders and two oxygen concentrators and slid them between the boot space and the rear seats, before driving away.

These floods have hit Kashmir amid crippling economic woes.

Six years ago, the Indian government stripped the region’s historic special status and demoted it from a state to a federally governed region, a move that escalated tensions with archrival Pakistan. To prevent protests, India imposed a major lockdown, suspending telecommunications and jailing thousands of people. The lockdown strangled the region’s economy, with an estimated economic loss worth $1.5bn.

Echoes of those measures continue to be felt across the region even today. According to the latest Indian government statistics, youth unemployment stands at 17.4 percent, much higher than the national average of 10.2 percent.

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The floods threaten to compound that crisis. Abdullah, the elected chief minister in the disputed province, drew parallels with the aftermath of the 2014 floods. Back then, too, he was in the same role, but at the time, Indian-administered Kashmir had semiautonomous status, giving Abdullah, in some ways, more power than other Indian state leaders.

In a post on X, he complained about the failure of authorities to learn from the lessons of 2014. “What flood mitigation measures were implemented since Oct (sic) 2014?” he asked, criticising those who ruled between his two tenures, including Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, a coalition partner in the provincial government between 2015 and 2018. “These are all questions that the elected government will seek answers to because the last 48 hours have been a shocking eye-opener.”

‘Decimation of local floodplains’

While extreme weather events continue to occur regularly across India, environmental experts in Kashmir say poor natural resource management and a flurry of reckless developmental projects have amplified threats.

“In the last five years, the authorities have felled up to a million trees for what they call their pasture land retrieval programmes,” explained Raja Muzaffar Bhat, a Srinagar-based activist.

In 2020, authorities in Kashmir began evicting forest-dwelling tribal communities from their homes by cutting down their orchards. Authorities accused the communities of having “encroached” on forest land. However, the “tribals” insist they have been cultivating the land for generations.

Major construction projects, including tunnels bored through mountains, also added to the dangers of ecological collapse, Bhat suggested.

He cited the example of a 61km road project that aims to skirt past traffic-congested Srinagar city and ease access between other districts of Kashmir. The road is being built on floodplains that historically have absorbed surging waters, saving Srinagar from flooding. Instead, Bhat said, it could have been built on elevated pillars.

Tonnes of soil were extracted from precious elevated tablelands called karewas for laying the foundations on which these roads have been built, and they will pass through the floodplains of Kandizal (between the districts of Srinagar and Pulwama), Muzaffar said. The floodplains had an important role as they absorbed the water surge and prevented Srinagar city from being flooded.

Kashmir’s “topographical balance that had existed naturally for hundreds of years” is being disturbed, Muzaffar said. And this week’s floods could soon become the norm.