KASHMIR BLUES –

August 18, 2021 – That first encounter with charas happened on a day Murad would never forget, and not because of his introduction to charas. It was the day he’d won a local football competition for the first time as team captain. “I kicked the ball straight out of the park,” he recalled, with a perceptible smile in his voice. “Quite literally.”  Murad’s love for all things football was for him the only “cocoon of safety” in one of the most brutally contested, militarised regions in the world – the Muslim-majority union territory of Jammu and Kashmir in north India. Murad lives in Anantnag in Indian-administered Kashmir, located at a distance of 53 kilometres from the capital city of Srinagar. 

According to various reports, drug usage has skyrocketed in Kashmir in the last three years, with some estimates suggesting the rise to be almost 1,500 percent. Children as young as 10 have been checked into Kashmir’s drug deaddiction centres. Indian authorities have attributed the sudden spike to “narco-terrorism”allegedly orchestrated by Pakistan which shares a border of 1,222 kilometres with Jammu and Kashmir. However, the realities on the ground are more nuanced. The confluence of unemployment, depression, people’s anxiety about their lives, and increasing suicides, contribute to pushing more Kashmiri youth into drugs.

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