SINAGAR: In Narwal, Jammu, a small, single-storey house that had stood for four decades came crashing down under the weight of bulldozers on a cold Thursday morning. It belonged to seventy-two-year-old Ghulam Qadir Daing, father of journalist Arfaz Ahmad Daing.
As the Jammu Development Authority machines tore through the modest structure, his family stood helpless, pleading, crying, and watching the roof of their lives collapse. No prior notice, neighbours insisted. No explanation that made sense. Only dust, disbelief, and the bewildering silence that follows sudden loss.
The elected government said it had nothing to do with it.
Into this bleak moment stepped the state’s Deputy Chief Minister Surinder Choudhary, his shoes sinking into the rubble as he walked through what used to be a living room. He spoke sharply, demanding answers from the administration and the officers who had arrived with bulldozers without consulting either the Chief Minister or the elected leadership. He said the police were under the L-G, the JDA vice-chairman was appointed by the L-G, and if the demolition was not ordered by Raj Bhavan, then “who dared to do this without asking the L-G or the CM?”
Choudhary’s voice rose as he insisted that the elected government was neither weak nor helpless and that it would not allow selective, vindictive actions against journalists or the poor. “If someone thinks they can run Jammu and Kashmir with oppression and suppression, it will not last long,” he said. He asked the Lieutenant Governor to order an inquiry, suspend the officers, and fix responsibility.
But what happened next was something politics could neither script nor control.
Even before the microphones cooled, a Hindu neighbour, retired Army veteran Kuldeep Sharma, quietly stepped forward. He had watched the demolition on video, had seen the trembling hands of Ghulam Qadir begging the officers, and had heard the children crying in fear.
“No one should see that,” Sharma later said. That night, he barely slept. By morning, he had made his decision. He walked to Arfaz, placed a hand on his shoulder, and told him he would give him five marlas of his own ancestral land so the family could rebuild their home. His daughter Taniya supported the idea. Humanity came first, she said.
It took only a few hours for this act to light a spark that travelled across the Pir Panjal.
On Saturday, as news of Sharma’s generosity reached Kashmir, a Muslim businessman in Pampore dialled his number. He told him he had been moved, deeply, and that he wanted to give Sharma something in return, not as a transaction but as a tribute to the humanity he had seen in him. He offered one kanal of land, four times what Sharma had given to the Daing family, or the money equal to its value, roughly around Rs one crore. When he made the offer, Sharma broke into tears. “Land is nothing,” the businessman told him. “If needed, I can offer my blood. Humanity must live.”
No press conference, no party banner, no loud claims of heroism. Just a Kashmiri Muslim honouring a Dogra Hindu for helping another Kashmiri Muslim whose house had been demolished by the state. A chain of compassion stretching across religion, region, and the deep political wounds that Jammu and Kashmir carries.
It was precisely the kind of story that defied the narrative that the Bharatiya Janata Party has been amplifying, Hindus versus Muslims, Jammu versus Kashmir. Because in this story, neither Hindu nor Muslim asked who the other voted for. Neither Jammu nor Kashmir asked what language the other spoke. And no one who acted did so on the orders of any government.
Instead, ordinary people did what extraordinary moments demand: they held each other up.
The administration may continue its explanations, the officers may face inquiries, and the political fight over who authorised the demolition will continue to echo. The Deputy Chief Minister has publicly said the elected government is committed to protecting democratic space and that silencing journalists is unacceptable in a society that claims to respect the Constitution. He has demanded clarity from the JDA on whose instructions the demolition was carried out and insisted that the truth must be traced to its source.
Yet, even as the blame game swirls, it is the quieter story that has travelled farther. A father’s destroyed home has unexpectedly built a bridge between two regions that are often portrayed as eternally divided. An Army veteran in Jammu is giving land to a Muslim journalist’s family. A Kashmiri businessman is giving even more land to that veteran. A cycle of compassion that began with pain but ended in something that looked like hope.
This is the Jammu and Kashmir that people rarely see. Not the one of shouting studios and political scripts, but the one of neighbours, of strangers moved by suffering, of hearts responding before heads start calculating. A place where, as Deputy Chief Minister Choudhary recalled, “the lions and goats once drank water together.”
In Narwal, the rubble of Ghulam Qadir’s demolished home still lies on the ground. But somewhere between that rubble and the land now being offered in Pampore, something remarkable has risen—an old truth that many had forgotten.
Love can spread faster than hate.
And sometimes, even in the most divided of lands, humanity writes its own headlines.
