Women prepare a meal for border residents at a relief camp in Nowshera sector’s Nonial village on Thursday. Tribune Photo: Inderjeet Singh

Arteev Sharma

Tribune News Service

Nonial Relief Camp (Nowshera), May 18It’s a quite unusual scene at the relief camp set up at Government Middle School, Nonial, where around 250 people from villages located near the Line of Control (LoC), including Sher Makri, Sarya and Bhawani, have taken a refuge.Their stay is a perfect glimpse of how much troubled and dangerous life border villagers live on a daily basis. They have been at the relief camp for a week. Their stay is likely to be prolonged in view of villagers’ reluctance to return to their native places as they don’t want to put their lives in danger.Pakistani firing and shelling has not only shattered their lives completely, but also separated family members and school friends from each other as many parents and children are being forced to stay separately at different camps due to space crunch.At Government Middle School, Nonial, about 250 migrants have been accommodated in 10 class rooms which don’t have proper mattings and beddings. During daytime, these rooms are used for conducting classes for the migrant children while the regular classes for students of the school are being held at a hall of the adjacent gurdwara.There are rooms in the school where about 35-40 persons are forced to sleep at night because some rooms are small in size and can’t accommodate large number of people.According to the affected families, their daily menu includes ‘mixed dal’ during lunch and dinner and ‘aloo nutri’ during breakfast. The community kitchen is being handled by the women staying in the camp. They are provided milk either on alternate days or after a gap of two days which means young children are being given ‘kawah’ (black tea) in place of milk.“Badi mushkil se jaan bachi hai ab waapis nahin jayenge (We saved our lives under difficult circumstances. We will not return to our homes now),” Sunita Devi, a mother of five, said while narrating the intense shelling from the Pakistan side on May 13 on her Sher Makri village.She said they had lost everything to the shelling and it was for third time that their house was damaged but they had not been paid any compensation. “Our cattle have perished. Our house is badly damaged and we have no money to meet the demands of our children. Ministers, MLAs and politicians make loud statements from AC rooms but it is the poor who are dying on the border,” she said.Satish Kumar, 37, of Sher Makri village bears lot of grudges against the ruling BJP at the Centre and in the state. He said, “Modi sahib kehte hai ki kada jawab denge par unko kya pata yahan to gareeb hi marte hai (Modi says we will give a befitting reply to Pakistani firing but he does not know that only poor are dying on the border).” He said, “Let them stay for one night with us on the day of shelling. They will come to know about the ground reality.”He said they had faced a similar situation last year when the villagers left their homes and took refuge in relief camps. “On August 8 last, we left our homes and were forced to stay in camps for a week. Thereafter, we stayed in camps for 25 days following border shelling on September 13 last year. Neither we were given any financial assistance at that time nor will we get this time. Let’s have a decisive battle to end this drama.”Another worry among the migrants is the well-being of their family members who are still stuck in border villages. “Our people have been requesting for bus service from Nowshera to the Sher Makri area (30-km distance) to shift the left-out people but no bus has been sent to ferry them safely to this place for the last three days,” said Ashok Kumar, a former naib sarpanch of Bhawani village.

11 villages affected

• As many as 11 border villages have been deserted by a majority of population following rise in tension on the Line of Control, a de facto border between India and Pakistan. These villages include Khamba, Sarya, Bhawani, Kalsian, Manpur, Dhanaka, Khori, Ganiah, Pukharni, Anwas Bhandar and Sher Makri, all in the Nowshera sector. A total of 23 villages are located close to the LoC in Nowshera tehsil