Opinion | Why No Green Politics in Jammu and Kashmir?

“Ann poshi teli yeli van poshi” — “Food will thrive only when forests thrive” — Sheikh-ul-Alam

We have an electoral politics of identity and a devotional politics of nature. What we don’t have is a governing politics of the forest that feeds us.

Every political ecology eventually asks the same question of a place: does the intensity of its material stakes in nature translate into the intensity of its politics about nature? In most of the Himalayan arc the answer has been a qualified yes. In Jammu and Kashmir it is a near-total no, and that asymmetry is the puzzle this piece explains. The region’s political life runs on two familiar axes: an electoral politics of identity and security, and a devotional politics in which nature appears as reverence and metaphor. Missing is a third, governing politics of the forest — deciding who cuts, who builds, who is liable, who pays. This is a genuine anomaly: J&K’s ecological stakes are higher than its Himalayan neighbours’, not lower. It sits at the head of the Indus system, anchors South Asia’s most landslide-prone slopes, and holds glacial mass on which water security for a far larger downstream population depends. A polity governing that endowment might be expected to treat its stewardship as a first-order political question, on par with security itself. It does not — and understanding why is this piece’s task.

Security, rightly understood

None of this argues against the primacy security has held in J&K’s politics. A region absorbing decades of militancy, cross-border tension, and constitutional upheaval has had every reason to organise itself around security and identity; these have been the precondition for anything else to matter, not a distraction. The point is not that security has crowded out ecology, but that security has been defined too narrowly. Contemporary security thinking, in India’s own strategic literature and internationally, has moved beyond a purely military conception toward a multidimensional one, where food, water, energy, and environmental security are integral to overall security rather than soft add-ons to it. A frontier whose forests anchor its slopes, glaciers feed its rivers, and wetlands buffer its floods cannot rationally exclude ecological stability from that calculus. Given how thin J&K’s buffer already is, environmental security is not a lesser cousin of conventional security; it is one of its most literal expressions. A cloudburst that kills seventy in an afternoon is a security failure, whichever department’s file it lands in.

The inherited ethic

The puzzle sharpens once the region’s own intellectual history comes into view. Long before “sustainability” entered policy language, Kashmir’s Rishi order had articulated an ecological ethic with striking precision: Sheikh-ul-Alam’s teaching that human subsistence is conditional on forest survival is a foundational statement of a moral economy in which nature is the precondition of collective life. A comparable sensibility runs through Lal Ded’s mysticism and Ladakh’s Buddhist restraint. This is not an argument that J&K lacks an environmental ethic — it already possesses the civilisational grammar for one. The task is recovery, not invention.

A frontier with no margin for error

Himalayan ecosystems regulate water, carbon, and biodiversity across a scale disproportionate to their footprint, and J&K sits near the head of these systems, not downstream. It straddles the Jhelum and Chenab catchments, tributaries of the Indus sustaining agriculture for hundreds of millions downstream. Its deodar, blue pine, and broadleaf forests across Doda, Kishtwar, Anantnag, and the Pir Panjal anchor slopes prone to landslip on some of South Asia’s steepest gradients, while Ladakh’s cold desert depends on a narrow band of glacial melt. The fragility compounds rather than stays static: wetlands such as Hokersar, Wular, and Hygam, once vast flood-absorbing sponges, have shrunk by more than half their historical area under siltation and encroachment, so the flood pulse they once absorbed now has nowhere to go. Deforestation on a slope shapes flood behaviour downstream; glacial retreat shapes stream flow a generation hence; a shrunken wetland changes the next monsoon.

What it looks like on the ground

In Shopian, apple orchards creep up slopes that were forest a decade ago, cleared because horticulture pays and afforestation doesn’t. Around Srinagar, the wetlands tell the same story in reverse: Hokersar’s sanctuary boundaries exist on paper while housing and vegetable plots creep into its floodplain, and Wular, once among Asia’s largest freshwater lakes, has lost much of its open water to willow plantation and reclamation. None of this is a scandal in the tabloid sense — it is slower, a thousand individually rational decisions adding up to a landscape that loses its buffer one orchard, one road, one reclaimed wetland at a time.

Growth remains a legitimate aspiration for a region that has carried decades of militancy, tourism collapse, and infrastructural neglect. The narrower point is that growth and ecological stewardship have been treated as substitutes rather than partners — visible in hydropower expansion along the Chenab and Jhelum, urban expansion into Srinagar’s wetlands, and unregulated construction in Gulmarg, Pahalgam, and Sonamarg. Growth aspirations are not the problem; growth pursued as though fragility were someone else’s concern is.

A climate coming apart

Over two decades, J&K’s weather has turned erratic rather than merely warmer. Winters swing between dry “black” spells and abrupt, intense snowfalls; spring rainfall now arrives in short, violent bursts rather than the sustained showers Kashmiri horticulture was built around; glacial monitoring across Kolahoi shows sustained recession, with consequences for the Jhelum’s summer discharge. Wetland hydrology is shifting in tandem: sharper rainfall overwhelms drainage that depends on Hokersar and Wular to absorb the surplus, so the same volatility destabilising glaciers is stripping away the buffer built to absorb it. Jammu’s plains see monsoon rain arriving in fewer, harder bursts, raising flash-flood risk along the Tawi and Chenab.

When the sky breaks over Gurez

Gurez illustrates this compounding fragility most starkly. Roads built to connect this Line-of-Control valley to the rest of Kashmir have, in the same movement, opened its pastures and riverbanks to construction no watershed assessment has kept pace with — guesthouses and riverside structures raised without the surveys that should have preceded them. That ill-timed construction is not incidental to what has followed. A cloudburst struck the Tulail sector in late August 2025; another hit Dawar in November, damaging a cowshed and severing a link road; in June 2026 a cloudburst tore through Tartei Kilshay village in Tulail, destroying homes, crops, and a bridge; a month later, in July 2026, fresh footage showed debris sweeping through another Gurez village. None matched the Chositi disaster in Kishtwar, where a cloudburst on 14 August 2025 killed at least 68 on the Machail Mata pilgrimage route, nor the twenty-odd cloudbursts that struck the Pir Panjal, Kishtwar, Kathua, and Gurez within a single window in July 2026, suspending the Amarnath, Vaishno Devi, and Shiv Khori pilgrimages and killing at least seventeen in Surankote. But together, Gurez’s cloudbursts describe a valley absorbing a serious event every two to three months, too fast for infrastructure or watershed to recover between strikes. Gurez is not a single failure to fix; it is a case study in how road-building, riverbank construction, and pasture encroachment compound faster than any department can track.

Plans on paper, absence in practice

J&K has never lacked policy instruments. Its climate action plan, under India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change, sets out missions on forestry, water, sustainable habitat, and Himalayan ecosystem preservation that read as comprehensive on paper; the plan’s Mission for Sustaining the Himalayan Ecosystem speaks directly to the fragility described here. The gap is political salience, not design. Forest staffing remains thin; wetland notifications for Hokersar and Wular exist as law but coexist with continued encroachment because no agency is resourced to enforce them; hydropower clearances function as paperwork, not real constraints. Forest, wildlife, wetland, and disaster functions sit across departments with limited mutual accountability, and no environmental degradation triggers the urgency a security lapse routinely does.

What Nund Rishi already knew — and what neighbours show

The Rishi order maintained sacred groves and planted orchards as devotion; Ladakh’s monasteries have long been quiet custodians of watershed and pasture. The absence of green politics is not a cultural shortage; it is those resources pensioned off as heritage instead of governance. Sikkim built an identity around forest cover; Himachal’s apple economy has forced open argument about water and climate stress; Uttarakhand’s disasters, from Kedarnath to Joshimath, have produced sustained debate about construction in fragile terrain. In each, environment has become something a government can be blamed for. In J&K it has not.

Recovering, not importing, an ethic

Three steps would help: give the National Action Plan on Climate Change’s local mission real budgetary lines and independent monitoring; bring the khanqah, the Auqaf, and Ladakh’s monastic structures into watershed and wetland governance as partners; and push electoral and civil-society actors to treat environmental performance, wetland health included, as a standing measure of governance on par with security. Hazard mapping, statutory floodplain and wetland-buffer protection, mandatory watershed-impact assessments, and early-warning systems for valleys like Gurez are the concrete, legislated version of the politics this region already has the ethical inheritance to build.

Balancing the account

This is, in the end, a case for widening the definition of security J&K already takes seriously, not for displacing it. A polity that treats environmental stability as integral to its security architecture, alongside military, economic, and food security, is not diluting its posture; it is completing it, on a frontier where forest, glacier, and wetland are as load-bearing as any border post. Growth, hydropower, tourism, and the horticulture sustaining Shopian and south Kashmir remain legitimate and necessary; nothing here argues for halting them. What Gurez shows, with increasing frequency, is what happens when growth proceeds without treating ecological carrying capacity as a binding constraint: aspiration curdles into damage faster than repair. Nund Rishi, Lal Ded, and Ladakh’s monastic tradition have already supplied the ethical vocabulary for restraint; missing is its translation into legislation with real penalties and one accountable authority. Security and identity will, rightly, remain central to J&K’s politics. But a politics that also spoke fluently, and with legal force, about the dying orchard, the vanishing wetland, and the valley absorbing a cloudburst every season would not be changing the subject. Given what Gurez and Kishtwar have shown these past two years, it would, for once, be on it.

Durdana Samoon is a research scholar and can be reached at Samoonduri@gmail.com.