Akhnoor, Jammu: India’s border with Pakistan along which the May conflict took place in Jammu and Kashmir is one of the most complicated boundaries of the world. Partly international and partly disputed, this year the border experienced a new warfare, a new normal and a fresh need for trauma care.
In this special report based on an August trip to Akhnoor region of Jammu border stretch, the community in a village called Sungal for the first time publicly talked about their experience of the war and its aftermath. Akhnoor is a town on the bank of the river Chenab that temporarily went dry after India suspended its participation from the Indus Water Treaty and closed a dam uphill for a few hours on May 5. Chenab is one of the major trans-boundary rivers of the Indus river basin.
Akhnoor is also the region where India’s International Border with Pakistan ends and the disputed border called Line of Control (LoC) begins. It thus has a huge deployment of military on both sides.
Akhoor is a nodal point on the ancient route to Kashmir and further to Central Asia called the Mughal route. At Akhnoor on the bank of Chenab is the northern most precinct of Harappan civilization in India. About two miles from this archaeological site is another 7th century Buddhist site called Ambaran on Chenab’s bank.
But this ancient pedigree doesn’t sanctify the place’s identity in independent India. It was always the war that identified it—first 1947, then 1965, then 1971, another in 1999 and now 2025.
The border residents, including a few community leaders and several community members, said in a specially arranged group discussion on August 8 that the May conflict reflects a change in warfare.
Shyam Lal Sharma, the chairman of SAMAH Devta Food and Agriculture Organization (FPO), a cooperative of 800 farmers from the adjoining border regions was born in 1954 and has witnessed all wars between India and Pakistan except for the war that happened immediately after the partition.
“Earlier wars used to be such that Pakistan would cross over to our side or we would march over to their side,” explained Sharma adding that the cross border firing happened briefly but the border didn’t face tension, the way it faced in the earlier wars.
“This was a fight using missiles and drones.”
According to a working paper titled “Four Days in May: The India-Pakistan Crisis of 2025” by Christopher Clary for Stimpson Center, the May conflict witnessed India using for the first time the BrahMos cruise missile (co-developed with Russia) and the European SCALP-EG cruise missile while Pakistan used for the first time short-range ballistic missiles called Fatah-I and Fatah-II. Each side also extensively used drones in a first time large-scale format to cause each other damage.
Anil Kumar, a teacher at the local government run school explained that the May conflict wasn’t a guerilla war, it was an army to army conflict. Village Sungal is just six kilometres away from the International Border but it extends to a length of 15 kilometres, which means more vulnerability during war times. The LOC is about 25 kilometres from Sungal.
“Immediately after Pahalgam, our region was put on high alert. From the next day we started seeing lots of movement of the Army. Army tanks moved through our village,” said Kumar.
There’s a military defence system at Tanda village just 6 kilometres from Sungal and when the drone strikes started they were visibly directed towards the Indian defence system nearby, which also meant all of them passed over Sungal. Around this time, Kumar said residents of the hilly villages around the Tanda defence system were already relocated to safer places.
Jammu city is 30 kilometres from Akhnoor town and over 10-15 kilometres from the nearest border stretch. Whenever cross border tensions or shelling happens it never reaches the very-densely populated city, said Vikrant Dogra, the chairperson of Jammu and Kashmir Dairy Cooperative Federation Limited which supports five cooperatives in Akhnoor.
“We never heard any cross-border shelling sounds. We would only read it the next morning in local newspapers. But this time it was like an open video game where sky was the screen,” said Dogra, a resident of Jammu city who had sent his children away to their grandmother in neighbouring state to prevent trauma.
DISPLACEMENT OF PEOPLE
Ram Paul Sharma, the sarpanch of one of the four panchayats of Sungal said that from across the larger stretch of Akhnoor, which consists of 34 villages including Sungal, over 70,000 people voluntarily migrated to safer places amidst visible panic on the border.
This was despite the fact that the war was mostly in the air—as visible in far off Jammu city as on the Akhnoor border. Air strikes meant the traditional definition of border as existing in earlier wars between India and Pakistan had changed but perceptions were yet to change and there was widespread confusion.
Shyam Lal and Ram Paul said as community leaders they were trying to help people comprehend that borders will not break and that they don’t need to leave their homes. Shyam Lal drew a parallel with the Iran-Israel war to explain that modern warfare doesn’t depend on proximity and there’s a new reality facing the border regions.
“There’s thousands of kilometres of border between Iran and Israel and yet there’s a war between them,” said Shyam Lal, while adding that right after Pahalgam as India had started to prepare for punitive strikes on Pakistan it had also started to prepare itself for counter strikes from the latter.
He believes that if India wasn’t prepared well to tackle drones and missiles, the border residents would be under greater threat.
“If that day (May 10), a ceasefire had not happened, the Army would have rescued and relocated us as well,” said Shyam Lal.
Dogra explained that several border residents in Chambb electoral constituency, one of the 90 constituencies in the Jammu and Kashmir legislative Assembly were earlier given residential plots of “five marla (1361 square feet)” by the government to help them have a parallel residence which they can use whenever a border threat arose. While there are bunkers on the border in Kathua, RS Pura and Jammu stretch and other stretches of the disputed border in Poonch and Rajouri, Akhnoor still doesn’t have sufficient numbers of bunkers for residents, according to the interviewees.
“So many residents from Akhnoor migrated to the hills, either to their relatives or to devasthans (local pilgrimage spots in the western Himalayan hills),” said Jagdish Raj, a panch who works in the Ram Paul-led panchayat.
“They migrated to safer areas where these drones didn’t reach. Not towards Jammu but about 20 kilometres away to the hilly regions.”
After India suspended its participation from the Indus Water Treaty, media the world over reported about India stopping the water of the Chenab river that flows into Pakistan on May 5. The villagers in Sungal described it as temporary closure for about six hours. They also mentioned watching a lot of unusual variation in the river flow between April 23 and May 7.
India started building the Salal Hydroelectric Power Project over Chenab uphill in Reasi district in 1970. Pakistan objected to its construction under the Indus Water Treaty and in 1978 India and Pakistan resolved it diplomatically.
Under this resolution, the Permanent Indus Commission, a body set up under the Indus Water Treaty for implementation of the agreement for settling disputes oversaw the cementing of the outlet bottom gates of the dam. The locals believe that these gates were blasted open but other sources denied that.
Sant Kumar Sharma, a veteran journalist and the coauthor of two books on the subject—”Indus Waters Story, Issues, Concerns and Perspectives”, and a more recently published book called “Indus Water Treaty, Mirroring the Facts”, said that the gates weren’t touched.
“As per the treaty, 30% of the water should always flow and within 24 hours the remaining 70% should also return. After Pahalgam, India stopped 100% of water in the Chenab while it opened all water of the lower Jhelum in Srinagar. On April 23 we also stopped sharing the river water data,” said Sant Kumar.
This according to him was to give a message to Pakistan that India has suspended the treaty. He said there are 280 sets of river data which India was sharing on a real time basis with Pakistan and all this stopped on April 23.
“Indus Water Treaty isn’t sacrosanct. We were telling them what we are capable of doing. However, the 1978 cemented doors weren’t touched,” said Sant Kumar, while terming their future status as a strategic affairs matter for India.
Jammu residing Sant Kumar said that India has only built Run of the River (ROR) dams under the Indus Water Treaty but after its suspension it may not remain so. According to him, the treaty was already redundant and in 2020 he had advocated for a revised version of the treaty, but after Pahalgam the entire treaty turned into abeyance.
He blamed the perpetual mistrust between India and Pakistan for the tensions and gave the example of the Danube river in Europe which is shared between 19 countries without any coordination problems.
“Indus Water Treaty doesn’t exist anymore. India said on April 23 that until Pakistan doesn’t stop terrorism, the Indus Water Treaty will not be restored,” said Sant Kumar, while adding its future is unpredictable.
In late August, Jammu region witnessed massive floods and according to him, India issued a warning to Pakistan as an humanitarian gesture. This was done outside the framework of the suspended treaty and the information was shared with diplomats and not with the designated engineers as was done earlier under the treaty.
Venus Upadhayaya is a senior journalist with special reporting experience in the border regions of Jammu and Kashmir. She’s currently researching India’s unorganized sector and the need for trauma care on the border regions.
