A bus crashed this Wednesday on a mountain road in Jammu and Kashmir, India, killing 39 passengers and injuring 18 others. The 42-seat vehicle had left Kishtwar with a dozen extra occupants. bound for Jammu.
According to the police, in one of the curves, taken at excessive speed not far from the city of Doda, the bus would have hit the protective edge, falling down a ravine 250 meters deep, until stopping in pieces on a further road. ancient.
Several of the injured, hospitalized in Jammu, are in very serious condition. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised compensation equivalent to 2,200 euros to the family of each deceased and more than 500 to each injured person. Locals complain about the poor condition of roads in the Chenab valley, which includes Doda and Kishtwar districts.
Every year, around a thousand people die in traffic accidents in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Many of them, on the so-called "killer roads" of the Chenab valley. The political limbo in which Jammu and Kashmir finds itself, the former Indian state deprived of self-government and directed directly from New Delhi for more than five years, does not contribute to its maintenance.
Although the Indian government considers that "normality" has been restored in Jammu and Kashmir, there is no date for the restoration of its institutions and the holding of elections. It should be said that the Kashmir Valley is overwhelmingly Muslim, while Jammu is majority Hindu. In the crash valley, halfway between Srinagar and Jammu – the respective summer and winter capitals, now deactivated – where the population is much more mixed, Kashmiri armed militancy is endemic.
A week ago there was an exchange of gunfire and artillery on the Jammu demarcation line between Indian and Pakistani units, resulting in one Indian soldier being killed. It should be noted that Pakistan controls one-third of the former principality of Jammu and Kashmir. India, meanwhile, has consolidated the split of Ladakh, with a Buddhist and Shiite population in almost equal parts. Even earlier, Pakistan had also carved out on its own Gilgit-Baltistan from what it calls Free Kashmir, under its control.
In another accident in Kashmir, last Saturday, three tourists from Bangladesh died in the fire that affected five boat-hotels, stranded on the idyllic Dal Lake in Srinagar.
