Faiz Dijoo
There is something quietly powerful about a city choosing to walk. Not march in protest, not rally in anger, but walk together—deliberately and with purpose—through streets that have seen more than their share of struggle.
Tomorrow, May 3, Srinagar will do exactly that, as Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha leads the Nasha Mukht Pad Yatra from TRC Football Ground to Lal Chowk, in what may be one of the most symbolically loaded public events the Valley has seen in recent years. Because this is not simply about awareness. It is about a society looking honestly at itself and deciding it wants something different.
Drug addiction has a way of arriving without announcement. It does not knock on doors or declare itself. It seeps in gradually—through a prescription that stretches too long, through a moment of curiosity that a young person cannot afford, through networks that have learned to exploit economic despair and social isolation with remarkable precision.
By the time a family realizes what has happened, the grip is already firm. Research from IMHANS Kashmir tells part of this story in numbers, pointing to a sharp rise in opioid dependence among teenagers and young adults. But numbers, however alarming, rarely capture what it actually feels like to watch someone you love disappear into addiction while still standing in the same room as you.
That human weight is what tomorrow’s march is really carrying. When students, shopkeepers, civil society workers, and government officials walk side by side through Srinagar’s familiar streets, they are not performing concern. They are expressing something far more personal than policy. They are saying, collectively, that this loss is unacceptable, and that a Kashmir that sacrifices its youth to addiction is not a Kashmir worth accepting.
Lieutenant Governor Sinha has spoken with unusual directness about a dimension of this crisis that most public discourse tends to sidestep. The narcotics trade in the Valley is not a standalone public health failure. It is architecturally connected to terrorism, with drug revenues financing instability in ways that are deliberate and strategic.
This reframes the entire conversation. Addiction here is not merely a personal tragedy unfolding in private homes. It is a calculated assault on the social fabric of a region that its adversaries have long tried to weaken by other means. Understanding this does not diminish the compassion owed to those suffering. It deepens the urgency of responding to their suffering with something more than sympathy.
The 100-day Nasha Mukht J&K Abhiyaan, of which tomorrow’s padyatra is a part, has been notable for refusing to stay at the surface. Alongside awareness rallies and school programs, authorities have moved against the infrastructure of the trade itself—seizing vehicles, freezing accounts, and attaching properties tied to trafficking networks.
At the grassroots, Nasha Nigrani Samitis have been formed at the village and ward levels, embedding vigilance into the very communities where addiction begins and where recovery must ultimately take root. These are not cosmetic gestures. They represent a genuine attempt to address the problem at multiple depths simultaneously.
And yet, the hardest work remains. Rehabilitation facilities are still strained beyond what the scale of the crisis demands. Families navigating recovery often do so without adequate guidance or support. Young people in remote areas remain outside the reach of awareness programs that function well in cities but fade before they reach the mountains.
The march tomorrow does not resolve any of this. What it does is create a public moment of accountability—a shared insistence that these gaps must be closed and that the people living with the consequences of this epidemic will no longer wait indefinitely for the systems that should serve them.
Lal Chowk, where the march concludes, has witnessed Kashmir through many of its defining chapters. Tomorrow, it will witness something different—not a confrontation or a crisis, but a community arriving together with intention.
The act of walking to that square, through open streets, in daylight, with neighbours and strangers shoulder to shoulder, is itself a kind of statement. It says that this Valley has not given up on itself, that its people understand what is at stake, and that the generation growing up here deserves the full protection of the society that brought them into the world.
