Quiet courage of Poonch

There are places where you find your sense of belonging. For me, that place is Poonch —a living archive of loss, endurance and courage. From 1947 to 2025, it has been witness to wars, displacement and militancy. Yet, Poonch continues to be relegated to the footnotes of history and, despite its strategic location, remains absent from policy conversations.

In 1947, the region didn’t just lose territory; it lost people, identity and continuity. Families were divided across the Line of Control — between Poonch and Haveli, Sadhnoti, Bagh, Muzaffarabad and Mirpur. The pain endured by this remote region is neither fully understood by the wider world, nor by the journalists who reported from the area last month for the first time — most of them unfamiliar with its layered history and the harsh realities of life along the borders with Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK).

The LoC is so close to the city that, on clear nights, the lights from homes in PoJK are visible. It is a daily reminder of how fragile and exposed this land is — both militarily and emotionally.

Poonch is a land of saints known for its beauty, its rivers, valleys, and mountains, but more importantly, for its pluralism and peaceful coexistence. It is where my mother was born and where my grandparents once lived before being displaced from their ancestral home in PoJK in 1947.

Through the toughest times in history, the people of Poonch and border areas of Jammu and Kashmir have held on to their land. Even after facing displacement and deep suffering, they remained as steadfast as the mountains that surround them.

All my life, I heard stories from my grandparents about the Partition and the tragic events that unfolded in Poonch, Mirpur and Muzaffarabad in 1947. They spoke of families forced to flee, homes abandoned overnight, lives torn apart by loss and separation. I never imagined that nearly eight decades later, I would witness a similar tragedy unfold.

On the night of May 7, as India launched Operation Sindoor, Pakistan retaliated by targeting the main city and civilians of Poonch. Artillery rained down on the towns and hamlets while people were asleep. The shelling claimed the lives of 14 civilians and forced nearly 10,000 persons to leave their homes.

The announcement of a ceasefire on May 10 brought a fragile sense of relief, but for many families, it marked the beginning of a long, painful journey back to broken houses, shattered rooftops.

Though the world has moved on, as it always does, for the people of Poonch — especially the women — life has been shattered in ways that may never fully heal. Perhaps, the greatest wound is not just the destruction, but how disconnected we are to the human cost of conflict.

I went to meet families displaced from Poonch — families that had taken refuge at Gurdwara Chand Kaur Sahib in Jammu. While sharing a langar meal, I sat listening to a woman and her children from Mankote village recount their journey to Jammu. Her voice trembled with exhaustion and quiet strength: “For how long will the people of Poonch be uprooted like this? Will there ever be a place we can truly call home?” Her question lingers.

Many in her village chose to stay behind despite the danger and help each other. It was in that very village, Mankote, where Ruby Kaur lost her life to the shelling.

That moment evoked a powerful image from my grandfather’s memoirs of 1947 — refugees from Muzaffarabad, Bagh, Sadhnoti, Poonch and adjoining areas boarding Dakota planes at the Poonch airfield in 1947, leaving behind their land, their lives, their everything.

Days after the ceasefire was announced, families displaced from Poonch have begun to return. But what they’ve come back to is no longer home — only fragments of the lives they once knew. The walls are cracked, the roofs gone.

Lecturer Manjeet Singh and his wife, a government school teacher, were sitting in their living room when a shell hit their terrace. They narrowly escaped and fled to safety in the chaos. When Manjeet returned days later, he found part of his house reduced to rubble.

Though a committee has been formed by Chief Minister Omar Abdullah to assess the damage, real relief may take months to reach. And time is something these families don’t have.

A painful photograph by Nazim Ali Manhas captures the quiet devastation: a woman sitting alone in the ruins of her kitchen — a place which once served food, warmth and love now charred and empty. Across Poonch, there are countless such stories — families who went to bed with a roof over their heads and woke up with nothing. And yet, they’ve returned. Not just to claim what’s left of their homes, but to reclaim their sense of dignity. According to preliminary reports, more than 500 homes have been fully or partially damaged. Soon, the headlines will fade, and attention will shift. But before that happens, I ask you to pause, hold space for these stories. Remember the children who will never grow up, and the mothers who now cradle memories instead of little ones.

One question bothers me: how could we overlook the obvious? Poonch, surrounded on three sides by PoJK, has always been a strategically sensitive zone. Any precise strike on terror camps across the border was bound to provoke retaliation. And yet, there was no warning and advisory issued for the public.

This wasn’t the first time Poonch has witnessed the fury of artillery fire — it happened during the 1971 and 1965 wars. In 2018, the Centre announced the construction of over 15,000 underground bunkers to protect civilians in border areas of J&K. Today, most of these exist only on paper.

The recent shelling has brutally laid bare the long-standing neglect of border communities in J&K. Hospitals are ill-equipped to handle emergencies, and the majority of those critically injured in the shelling were referred to Jammu.

Also, on the day when it mattered most, the administration was not prepared to deal with such a situation. People were left to fend for themselves. Civil society and local NGOs from Poonch came forward to provide shelter and food.

The story of Poonch is of quiet courage — of people who have endured decades of loss with resilience that rarely finds a place in our national conscience. Their suffering is not just collateral damage; it is the lived reality of those who guard India’s frontiers not with weapons, but with willpower.

As the dust settles over shattered homes and silenced courtyards, we must ask: how long can a nation turn its back on those who stand at its edges, absorbing the shocks of every geopolitical tremor?

— The writer is a columnist from J&K