Prerna Bhat
As the relentless monsoon of September 2025 finally begins to recede, the satellite images paint a stark and sobering picture of North India. Vast swathes of the subcontinent, once vibrant with the green of impending harvest, are now a monochrome canvas of brown and grey. The rivers, which for centuries have been the lifelines of this fertile land, have turned into instruments of destruction, their swollen currents rewriting landscapes and destinies with equal, unforgiving force. The national conversation, the primetime news debates, the trending hashtags, and the heartfelt appeals for aid have, quite rightly, centered on the immense suffering in Punjab. The images from the Malwa and Doaba regions are indeed apocalyptic: highways transformed into canals, tractors submerged up to their steering wheels, and farmers, the very backbone of the nation’s food security, gazing helplessly at inundated fields that represent a year’s labour and a lifetime of hope washed away. The national response has been swift and robust. Aid convoys are being flagged off from capital cities, celebrities are lending their voices to fundraising campaigns, and 24/7 news channels are running non-stop tickers with helpline numbers and updates on the monumental rescue efforts. The plight of Punjab is a national tragedy, and the nation has risen to acknowledge it. But as the focus remains intensely fixed on the plains, a profound and troubling silence emanates from the mountains and valleys just to the north. In Jammu and Kashmir, a catastrophe of arguably greater complexity and equal, if not greater, severity is unfolding in a vacuum of national attention, its narrative drowned out by the louder, more accessible tragedy downstream.
The story of the 2025 floods is not one story but a tale of two deluges, experienced and broadcast in starkly different ways. While the Sutlej and Beas rivers wreaked havoc across Punjab’s flatlands, the Chenab, Jhelum, and Tawi, along with countless glacial-fed tributaries, raged through the mountainous topography of Jammu and Kashmir with a ferocity that defies easy description. Here, the disaster was not just one of inundation but of brute force. The floods came not as a creeping sheet of water but as a violent torrent, a slurry of mud, boulders, and uprooted trees that gouged out hillsides, obliterated roads, and consumed entire homes in minutes. In districts like Anantnag, Kulgam, and Shopian in the Kashmir valley, and Kathua, Samba, and Poonch in the Jammu division, the devastation has been absolute. Yet, switch on any major national news channel, and you would be forgiven for thinking the monsoon’s fury had stopped at the Punjab border. The panel discussions analyze the economic impact on India’s grain production, but there is little to no mention of the complete decimation of Kashmir’s apple orchards, where trees laden with the prized Ambri and Delicious varieties, just weeks from harvest, were either submerged or simply uprooted and swept away. This isn’t just a loss of fruit; it’s the annihilation of the primary economic engine for hundreds of thousands of families, a blow that will take years, if not a generation, to recover from. The famed saffron fields of Pampore, delicate and precious, are now buried under feet of silt. The maize crops, a staple for countless highland communities, have been flattened. The narrative of the farmer’s loss in India, it seems, has a geographical preference.
Meanwhile, the devastation across the Jammu division, a region of diverse topography ranging from southern plains to the towering Pir Panjal mountains, presented its own unique and equally grim tableau of destruction that has been completely eclipsed. In Jammu city, the river Tawi, typically a placid waterway snaking through the urban sprawl, swelled into a raging, muddy torrent unseen in decades. It breached its concrete embankments, submerging the low-lying colonies of Bhagwati Nagar and Bela, forcing thousands to flee their homes with little more than the clothes on their backs. For three harrowing days, the city’s residents watched with bated breath as the furious currents slammed against the pillars of the main Tawi bridges, threatening to snap the very lifelines that connect the old city with its modern suburbs. Further south, in the districts of Kathua and Samba, which share a border with Punjab, the landscape of inundated paddy and wheat fields was deceptively similar to the images being broadcast nationally. However, the crisis here was compounded by violent flash floods from dozens of local streams cascading down from the Shivalik hills – the Ujh river, for instance, reportedly washed away a critical bridge connecting remote border villages, leaving them entirely marooned and beyond the reach of initial rescue efforts. Yet, it was in the mountainous districts where nature’s fury was most absolute and the silence of the national media most profound. In the border regions of Rajouri and Poonch, flash floods and landslides worked in tandem, with entire hillsides collapsing onto homes and roads, wiping small mountain hamlets off the map. Further east, the mighty Chenab river, swollen with glacial melt and incessant rain, unleashed its unparalleled power through the narrow gorges of Doda, Kishtwar, and Ramban. The most critical and strategically significant event, which has received almost no national mention, was the complete severing of the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway (NH44) in the Ramban sector. A series of massive landslides, described by locals as “entire mountains falling,” has buried a multi-kilometre stretch of this vital artery, creating a crisis within a crisis by trapping thousands of vehicles, including trucks laden with fuel, medicines, and food, and effectively cutting off all land-based supply lines to the entire Kashmir valley. This singular event, a logistical and humanitarian disaster of immense proportions, continues to unfold in an information void, a stark testament to the selective vision of the national narrative.
The discrepancy in attention becomes even more poignant when one considers the human and logistical challenges. In Jammu and Kashmir, the challenge is compounded by geography. The destruction of bridges and the triggering of hundreds of landslides have left countless villages entirely cut off, transforming them into isolated islands of despair. While rescue operations in the plains can utilize boats and inflatable rafts, in the Pir Panjal ranges, the only access is often through perilous treks or audacious helicopter sorties. It is in these isolated pockets of humanity that the true, untold story of the 2025 floods is being writtena story of incredible resilience, quiet heroism, and institutional neglect from the national media. The protagonists of this story are not telegenic rescue force commanders giving soundbites to waiting cameras; they are ordinary Kashmiri and Dogra civilians, Gujjar and Bakerwal nomads, and the stoic soldiers of the Indian Army’s Chinar and Northern Commands. With no national media to document their struggle, they have become their own first responders, their own chroniclers, and their own source of hope. There are incredible accounts, passed by word of mouth or through sporadic, weak mobile signals, of villagers forming human chains to pull neighbours from raging torrents, of local mosque and temple committees pooling resources to set up community kitchens, and of Bakerwal shepherds, with their intimate knowledge of the treacherous mountain passes, guiding army patrols to marooned hamlets that have been wiped off official maps.
The Indian Army, so often in the headlines for its counter-insurgency operations, is now waging a different kind of war – a war against geography and time. Soldiers are abseiling down sheer cliffs to deliver food packets, constructing makeshift rope bridges over chasms where concrete spans once stood, and carrying the sick and elderly on their backs for miles to the nearest medical aid post. These are powerful, nation-building images, visuals of citizens and soldiers united against a common, natural enemy. Yet, they remain unseen, their valour and the desperation of the people they are helping unbroadcast to the rest of the country. The silence is deafening. Why does the camera’s lens, so focused on one state, seem to be fitted with a filter that blocks out another? Why does the suffering of a citizen in one part of the country make for primetime news, while the identical suffering of another, just a few mountain ranges away, is met with an information blackout? The question is not meant to diminish the tragedy in Punjab, which is immense and deserving of every ounce of attention it receives. The question is about the conspicuous absence of the other.
This disparity in coverage raises uncomfortable questions about the very mechanics and motivations of our national media landscape. One could argue a case of logistics: Punjab’s plains are far more accessible for the large outdoor broadcasting (OB) vans of Delhi-based media houses than the remote, landslide-ridden valleys of Kashmir. It is easier to set up a camera in a flooded field in Ludhiana than on a precarious cliffside in Ramban. Proximity to the national capital and the ease of access undeniably play a role in shaping what gets covered. Furthermore, the narrative of Punjab as the “nation’s granary” is a powerful, easily digestible story. The economic impact is straightforward to quantify and explain to a national audience – less wheat and rice could mean higher food prices for everyone. The economic story of Jammu and Kashmir, centered on horticulture, handicrafts, and tourism, is perhaps perceived as more regional, its national impact less direct, and therefore, less newsworthy in the calculus of television rating points.
However, observers and locals on the ground suggest the reasons may be more deeply entrenched and far more unsettling. There is a palpable feeling among the people of Jammu and Kashmir that their land is often viewed by the mainstream consciousness through a singular, distorted lens: that of conflict and security. For decades, the region has been defined in the national imagination by terrorism, political instability, and military presence. This relentless “conflict-framing” may have created a form of narrative fatigue, or worse, an unconscious bias. It is possible that the media machinery, so accustomed to reporting on encounters and curfews, finds it difficult to pivot to a story of a humanitarian crisis. A natural disaster is a great leveller; it does not discriminate based on politics or identity. A flood victim in Kashmir is no different from a flood victim in Punjab. Yet, the media’s selective focus threatens to create a hierarchy of victimhood, an unintentional but dangerous precedent where the worthiness of a citizen’s suffering for national attention is determined by their state’s political narrative and geographical location.
The consequences of this media vacuum are devastatingly practical. The large-scale, citizen-driven donation drives that have been mobilized for Punjab have not materialized for Jammu and Kashmir, precisely because the majority of Indians are simply unaware of the scale of the calamity there. Corporate social responsibility funds, non-governmental organizations, and volunteer groups that would otherwise rush to provide aid are directing their resources elsewhere, guided by the images they see on their screens. For the people of Jammu and Kashmir, this is a double blow. First, they face the wrath of nature, and second, they face the cold indifference of perceived national apathy. The psychological toll of feeling abandoned in their darkest hour cannot be overstated. It risks deepening the fissures of alienation and validating the feeling that they are not considered an equal part of the national fabric. The government and military are on the ground, but the sense of a nation’s collective embrace, the feeling that “the country stands with you,” which is being rightly extended to Punjab, is tragically absent.
The post-flood situation will be far more challenging in the mountainous terrain. As the waters recede in Punjab, they will leave behind a monumental task of agricultural and infrastructural revival. In Jammu and Kashmir, the receding waters will reveal a landscape fundamentally and perhaps permanently altered. The topsoil from apple orchards and saffron fields, which takes centuries to form, has been washed away. The risk of disease from contaminated streams, the only source of drinking water in many high-altitude villages, is immense. With the harsh winter just a few months away, thousands of families are without shelter, their homes either non-existent or structurally unsafe. The immediate challenge of survival will soon be replaced by the long, arduous struggle of rebuilding lives and livelihoods from scratch, a struggle they will likely have to endure outside the national spotlight. The loss of livestock is another underreported tragedy. For the pastoral communities of the region, their sheep, goats, and cattle are their only form of wealth, their mobile bank accounts. Tens of thousands of animals have perished, swept away by the currents, leaving these already marginalized communities in a state of absolute penury.
This is not a plea to divert attention from Punjab. It is a demand to expand the definition of “nation” and “neighbour.” It is a call for a more equitable distribution of empathy. The technology exists. The journalists exist. The stories of both unimaginable loss and indomitable courage are there in Jammu and Kashmir, waiting to be told. It is incumbent upon the fourth estate, the supposed voice of the voiceless, to ask itself why it has chosen to be silent. It must move beyond the path of least resistance and tell the stories that are difficult to reach but essential to hear. A nation’s character is not defined by how it responds to a well-publicized crisis, but by its ability to see and feel the pain of its most remote and forgotten corners. As of September 16, 2025, in the tale of two deluges, one story is being told with the urgency it deserves. The other, a saga of equal devastation and heroism, remains a whisper in the mountains, waiting for the nation to listen.
Author is MA Mass Communication, AJK MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
