Army's field day in Kashmir forces Tosamaidan residents to stay cooped up in their homes

SRINAGAR: For a small part of Kashmir, summer brings a winter of discontent for its residents. In Tosamaidan, where the Indian army converts a meadow into a shooting range, residents are ordered to stay cooped up in their homes as the soldiers outside enjoy a field day. Even in peacetime, a war-like situation exists in Tosamaidan, home to 16 villages within and outside the area the army and air force take over every year between May and August for artillery practice.

The deafening sound of bursting artillery and mortar shells has shattered any semblance of normalcy in the region. Hairline cracks on walls widen every year.

Villagers say abandoned artillery and the scattering fragments from the exploding shells have consumed as many as 60 lives so far and left several maimed. Children are born with hearing defects, they claim.

“We have lost more than 60 people since 1962 when the first civilian was killed by a shell,” said Mohammad Akram, the sarpanch of Shanglipora village who limps due to injuries sustained in a shelling incident in 2002. “We can not move out of our homes for most of summer and every family living around the range has one to three deaf members.”

Bilal Ahmad, one of the 42,000 people residing in the affected area, said almost half of the school-going children in his village ‘Sitharan’ are deaf. The army’s 50-year lease for this area ends in April next year, and it has approached the state government for an extension. But this has lit a fuse that appears hard to stop.

A people’s movement against the annual army drills has gained traction. The pressure group, ‘Tosamaidan Bachao Front’ is led by Nazir Ahmad whose family is said to have lost three boys when an abandoned bomb they were playing with exploded.

The disgruntled lot wants Tosamaidan to be nursed into a tourist hotspot, just like Gulmarg and Dudpathri that flank it. They say it will help them supplement their meagre income from growing maize and rearing cattle and move away from scavenging for metal scraps from used artillery shells.