By Ayaan Saroori

The Chenab Valley comes into sight only when the skies break open.

A sudden cloudburst carries away homes, or a landslide swallows a road. In those hours of disaster, cameras arrive and the valley appears on the nation’s maps.

Then the attention fades, like rain clouds drifting over the mountains.

What remains is a longer story, less dramatic but more painful: slow erosion of promises, struggle for recognition, and weariness of a people left waiting.

The river that gives the valley its name runs restless and blue, cutting deep through the Lesser Himalayas. Along its banks lie the districts of Doda, Kishtwar, and Ramban, townships where languages braid into one another, where Kashmiri mingles with Urdu and local dialects, and where feasts resemble the valley’s traditions but in humbler form.

The Chenab flows steadily, carrying histories across ridges, but the people who live with it remain caught in a pause. They belong neither fully to Jammu, nor fully to Kashmir.

In that in-between space, their demands are spoken and forgotten, year after year.

The idea of a separate divisional status........

© Kashmir Observer