J&K 2025: A year of suffering, and of civic renewal |
The year that has just passed will remain etched in the public memory of Jammu and Kashmir as one of prolonged distress and collective anxiety. It was a year in which the grammar of everyday life was repeatedly disrupted — first by the shadow of war, and later by the fury of nature.
For many in the J&K, war was not a distant geopolitical contest but an immediate and lived experience. The sight of drones overhead, the sound of shelling across the Line of Control, and the unrelenting tension in border districts such as Poonch and Rajouri brought home once again how fragile normalcy remains. Lives were displaced, homes were damaged, and entire communities were forced to negotiate survival under conditions of permanent vulnerability.
Nature then compounded this suffering. Unprecedented and incessant rains triggered floods across large parts of Jammu and Kashmir, destroying crops, washing away infrastructure, and damaging thousands of homes. Economic distress deepened, and psychological exhaustion became a shared condition.
Yet 2025 should not be remembered merely as a year of hardship. It deserves to be recalled as a year in which society in Jammu and Kashmir asserted its moral and civic boundaries with uncommon clarity — rising above narrow parochial and communal lines to affirm its ethical core and civic conscience. Across both the Jammu region and the Kashmir Valley, there was a visible and deliberate transcendence of parochial loyalties and communal divisions, expressed through acts of........