Prerna Bhat
As the relentless monsoon of September 2025 finally begins to recede, satellite images paint a stark picture of north India. Vast swathes of land, once vibrant with the green of impending harvest, now lie as a monochrome canvas of brown and grey. Rivers that for centuries sustained these fertile plains have turned into instruments of destruction, their swollen currents rewriting landscapes and destinies with unforgiving force.
The national conversation, primetime debates, trending hashtags, and appeals for aid, has rightly centered on Punjab, where highways have become canals, tractors are submerged, and farmers, the backbone of the nation’s food security, watch helplessly as a year’s labour and a lifetime of hope vanish underwater. Aid convoys have been flagged off from capital cities, celebrities have lent their voices to fundraising campaigns, and news channels run non-stop tickers with helpline numbers and updates.
Yet, as the spotlight remains fixed on the plains, a profound silence hangs over the mountains to the north. In Jammu and Kashmir, a catastrophe of equal, if not greater, severity is unfolding, its story drowned out by the louder, more accessible tragedy downstream. Here, rivers swollen with glacial melt have torn through valleys with brutal force, destroying homes, roads, orchards, and entire livelihoods. While Punjab’s floods dominate headlines, Kashmir’s devastation—apples uprooted weeks from harvest, saffron fields buried under silt, and villages cut off by landslides, is largely invisible. The human struggle, resilience, and quiet heroism of civilians, shepherds, and soldiers alike remain unseen, a stark reminder of the selective gaze of the national narrative.
The 2025 floods are a tale of two deluges, experienced and reported in starkly different ways. While the Sutlej and Beas ravaged Punjab’s flatlands, the Chenab, Jhelum, and Tawi, fed by glaciers, tore through the mountainous terrain of Jammu and Kashmir with unparalleled force. These were not slow-rising waters but violent torrents of mud, boulders, and uprooted trees that gouged hillsides, destroyed roads, and swept away homes within minutes.
In districts like Anantnag, Kulgam, Pulwama, Shopian, Kathua, Samba, and Poonch, the devastation was absolute. Yet, turn on any national news channel, and it might seem the floods stopped at Punjab’s border. Panel discussions focus on grain production, while the complete decimation of Kashmir’s apple orchards, Ambur and Delicious varieties weeks from harvest, goes largely unmentioned. The famed saffron fields of Pampore lie buried under silt, and maize crops, a staple for highland communities, have been flattened. This is not merely the loss of crops; it is the annihilation of the primary economic engine for hundreds of thousands of families, a blow that could take years, if not a generation, to recover from. The narrative of India’s farmer, it seems, has a geographical preference.
Meanwhile, Jammu division, with its diverse topography from southern plains to the towering Pir Panjal, faced its own grim devastation largely eclipsed by national attention. In Jammu city, the normally placid Tawi swelled into a raging, muddy torrent, breaching embankments and submerging colonies like Bhagwati Nagar and Bela, forcing thousands to flee with little more than the clothes on their backs. For three harrowing days, residents watched as furious currents battered the main bridges, threatening the lifelines connecting the old city to its suburbs. Further south, in Kathua and Samba, the inundated paddy and wheat fields mirrored images from Punjab, but flash floods from dozens of Shivalik streams, like the Ujh, washed away critical bridges, leaving villages isolated.
In the mountainous districts, nature’s fury was most absolute. In Rajouri and Poonch, flash floods and landslides obliterated homes and roads, erasing small hamlets from the map. Further east, the swollen Chenab tore through the narrow gorges of Doda, Kishtwar, and Ramban. Most critically, the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway (NH44) in Ramban was completely severed. Massive landslides, described by locals as “entire mountains falling,” buried a multi-kilometre stretch, trapping thousands of vehicles, including trucks carrying fuel, medicines, and food, and cutting off all land-based supply to the Kashmir valley. This singular logistical and humanitarian disaster continues largely unreported, a stark testament to the selective vision of the national narrative.
The discrepancy in attention becomes even more striking when one considers the human and logistical challenges. In Jammu Kashmir, hundreds of landslides and destroyed bridges have cut off countless villages, turning them into isolated islands of despair. While rescue teams in the plains rely on boats and rafts, access here often demands perilous treks or daring helicopter sorties. In these remote pockets, the untold story of the 2025 floods unfolds, a tale of quiet heroism and resilience, largely ignored by the national media.
Ordinary Kashmiri and Dogra civilians, Gujjar and Bakerwal nomads, and soldiers of the Indian Army’s Chinar and Northern Commands have become both rescuers and chroniclers. Villagers form human chains to pull neighbours from raging torrents, mosque and temple committees pool resources for community kitchens, and Bakerwal shepherds guide army patrols through treacherous passes to hamlets erased from official maps.
The Indian Army, often in headlines for counter-insurgency, is now waging a different kind of war, a war against geography and time. Soldiers abseil down cliffs to deliver food, construct makeshift rope bridges over broken spans, and carry the sick and elderly miles to medical aid. These acts of courage, a testament to citizens and soldiers united against nature, largely remain unseen. Why does national media spotlight one state while virtually ignoring another, where suffering is no less real? This is not to diminish Punjab’s tragedy, immense and deserving as it is, but to highlight the conspicuous absence of another equally devastated region.
This disparity in coverage raises uncomfortable questions about the mechanics and motivations of national media. Logistics play a role: Punjab’s plains are far more accessible to OB vans than the remote, landslide-prone valleys of Kashmir, making it easier to broadcast from flooded fields in Ludhiana than from cliffside villages in Ramban. The story of Punjab as the “nation’s granary” is also more digestible for a national audience, its economic impact straightforward to quantify. By contrast, Jammu and Kashmir’s horticulture, handicrafts, and tourism may be perceived as regional, their losses less directly affecting the national narrative and, consequently, less newsworthy.
Observers and locals suggest the reasons may be more deeply entrenched. For decades, Jammu and Kashmir has been viewed through a singular lens of conflict and security, defined in the national imagination by militancy, political instability, and military presence. This relentless framing has fostered narrative fatigue, or perhaps unconscious bias, making it difficult for the media to pivot to humanitarian crises. A natural disaster is a great leveller; a flood victim in Kashmir is no different from one in Punjab. Yet selective focus risks creating a hierarchy of suffering, where the national attention a citizen receives is shaped more by geography and political narrative than by the scale of their loss.
The consequences of this media vacuum are devastatingly practical. Citizen-driven donation drives and CSR support that flowed to Punjab have not reached Jammu and Kashmir, largely because most Indians remain unaware of the scale of the calamity there. NGOs and volunteers, guided by what they see on screens, have redirected resources elsewhere. For locals, this is a double blow: first, they endure nature’s fury; then, the cold indifference of perceived national apathy. The psychological toll of feeling abandoned in their darkest hour cannot be overstated, risking deeper alienation in a region already grappling with historical marginalization. While the government and military respond on the ground, the sense of a nation’s collective embrace—the feeling that “the country stands with you”—is tragically absent.
As the waters recede, Jammu and Kashmir faces a far harsher and more enduring challenge than Punjab. Topsoil from apple orchards and saffron fields has been washed away, streams are contaminated, thousands of families remain without safe shelter, and tens of thousands of livestock have perished. The immediate struggle for survival will soon give way to the long task of rebuilding lives and livelihoods, largely outside the national spotlight. This is not a plea to divert attention from Punjab, but a call to expand the definition of “nation” and “neighbour.” The stories of loss and courage are waiting to be told; it falls on the media to move beyond ease and proximity, to bear witness to what is remote but no less vital. A nation’s character is measured not by how it responds to a well-publicized crisis, but by whether it hears the whispers from its most forgotten corners.
The author is a pursuing MA Mass Communication at AJK MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
Prerna Bhat
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