DHANNA (Azad Jammu and Kas­hmir): Chaudhry Hakam Deen has a bunker — a cold, damp hole dug in the ground — next to his home where he and his family have often taken refuge amid soaring tensions with India.

Spending the night inside, he said, “feels like sitting in a graveyard”. The shelter dates from the Kargil conflict, a skirmish held between India and Pakistan in 1999.

The latest crisis was sparked by a Feb 14 suicide bombing in India-held Kashmir (IHK) that killed 40 Indian paramilitaries, and was claimed by a Pakistan-based militant group.

In its aftermath, New Delhi and Islamabad launched tit-for-tat air strikes against each other, igniting fears of fresh conflict in South Asia.

The forces of the two countries regularly send shells and gunfire across the Line of Control (LoC).

But as they stumbled to the brink of war in recent weeks, there was a surge in the already-heavy firing, and families such as Deen’s found the bunkers a miserable refuge.

Deen’s shelter, a stone’s throw from his house in the village of Dhanna some five kilometres from the LoC, is as tiny as it is uncomfortable: just four feet long and three feet wide.

Most adults cannot stand beneath its low ceiling, for­ced to sit or squat on cardboard or carpets, huddled around a mud stove whose smoke makes the inhabitants cough.

“When shelling starts we take our children... inside the bunker,” Deen says, looking down. “They don’t have strength in their legs to even walk to the bunker, they don’t eat anything inside out of fear,” he adds.

For his older brother Chaudhry Maqbool, being in the bunker is worse than just being in a cemetery: it feels like sitting in a grave itself.

The white and blue walls of Deen’s home are studded with holes, some the size of a fist. One shell landed in his kitchen, while another broke an outside door.

He has piled sandbags at the entrance to his bunker. But in the event of an explosion, the packed earth walls and the roof of branches and plastic sheets may not be enough to protect those huddled inside.

Several civilians and soldiers died in the recent shelling on both sides of the LoC.

In Dhanna, the shelling was so intense that most of the 2,000 villagers fled. Only a handful stayed to protect their property.

A witness saw a dozen houses, a health centre and a service station that had been hit by the Indian strikes.

The women and children of Deen’s family were finally evacuated to the nearby town of Kotli, which was less exposed.

Tensions may have eased for now, but overall the shelling has increased dramatically since 2016, and locals fear worse is to come.

“This is a valley of fear. Life is at a standstill here,” said Sardar Javed, a local journalist.

Published in Dawn, March 10th, 2019