I. Ahmad Wani
There are mornings in Kashmir that the calendar will not be allowed to forget. The first of June, 2026, was one of them. From the Laroo Bus Stand in Kulgam — a town whose name once travelled in the country’s newspapers attached to grimmer words — a river of people began to move. Students with their school bags still on their shoulders, mothers, shopkeepers, clerics, young men who only a few seasons ago might have been counted among the lost, all of them walking in the same direction, under the same sky, behind the same man. The tricolour rose above them, and for once it was not a thing to be watched warily from a distance. It was carried. It was waved. It was claimed.
This is how the war is being fought now. Not with the clatter of boots alone, but with footsteps.
The beginning, from the beginning
To understand the morning in Kulgam, one must return to where it began. On the 11th of April, 2026, Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha stood on the hallowed turf of Maulana Azad Stadium in Jammu and sounded what he himself called a clarion call to total war — a hundred-day crusade against the addiction that had been eating quietly at the region’s youth. He framed it plainly: addiction, he said, was no mere personal failing but a gaping wound in society’s fabric, and the enemy across the border had learned to deploy it as a weapon, nurturing terror through the smuggling of narcotics and eroding the nation’s strength from within.
Few believed, in those early April days, that a mass movement against drugs was even possible here. Many underestimated the strength of an awakened public. Cynics waited for the campaign to fade into the usual file-driven routine of inaugurations and forgotten follow-ups.
They were wrong. What the Lieutenant Governor lit in Jammu did not flicker. It spread.
A movement that learned to walk
In the weeks that followed, the padyatra became the campaign’s beating heart, and the Lieutenant Governor took it personally, district by district, into the heart of the Valley.
In Anantnag, on the tenth of May, he led a procession from Degree College Khanabal to Nai Basti, calling on every section of society to break its silence — for, as he put it, this war could only be won if the people spoke in one voice about the dangers before them. In Kupwara, on the thirteenth, thousands assembled near the Boys Higher Secondary School to hear him declare that in barely a month the civil and police administration had struck a devastating blow to the entire smuggling ecosystem, and that a people’s movement was transforming into a revolution. In Shopian, on the twenty-third, he stood before another vast gathering and spoke of a “new era,” of voices rising from every street and village demanding that not a single smuggler be spared. In Srinagar, the procession flowed from the TRC grounds to Lal Chowk — the very square that has stood for so much of the region’s troubled history — and thousands walked it in the name of a drug-free future.
And then Kulgam. The Deputy Commissioner had spoken beforehand of an enthusiasm that was almost impatient, of preparations nearly complete and a public eager to join. What mattered, he said, was not merely the headcount but that people from every village, every panchayat, every locality should come. They came. The Lieutenant Governor, walking among them, said the campaign now belonged to the people — that parents, teachers, religious leaders and young volunteers had stood shoulder to shoulder with the administration. “I stand before you,” he told them, “not only as your Lieutenant Governor but as a member of your family who shares your pain, your struggles, and your dream of a safe, empowered and drug-free Jammu Kashmir.”
It was, those present said, more festival than rally.
The weight of the contrast
To feel the full force of that sentence — more festival than rally — one has to remember what these districts once meant when a Governor came visiting. There was a time, and it was not so long ago, when the arrival of the head of the administration in a southern Kashmir district announced itself through shuttered shop fronts, deserted lanes and a heavy deployment of troops. The town would hold its breath. Doors would close. The visit was something to be endured rather than welcomed.
Compare that to the scene at Kulgam: open shops, open faces, schoolchildren and grandmothers in the same crowd, the flag passing hand to hand. The transformation is not cosmetic. It is the most eloquent measure of how far the relationship between the people and the state has shifted. The crowds reached into the lakhs across the campaign’s many stops, and through it all — and this deserves to be said plainly and gratefully — there was no miscreant, no incident, no shadow over the proceedings. People came as the sons and daughters of one Bharat, and they behaved as one family does at a wedding, not as a population under watch.
A great deal of quiet credit for that belongs to the district administrations — to the officers and staff of Anantnag, Kulgam, Kupwara, Baramulla and beyond who handled enormous crowds with patience and grace, and to a police force that, on this occasion, was present not to contain the people but to walk with them.
The hammer at the bottom
And yet none of this softness should be mistaken for a lack of steel. While the padyatras carried the message of compassion, the enforcement machinery moved with a force that was felt where it mattered most — at the very bottom of the supply chain, where the peddler meets the vulnerable.
The figures speak for themselves. By the time of the Kulgam march, more than a thousand smugglers and peddlers had been arrested since the campaign began on the 11th of April; over fifty-five traffickers had been detained under the stringent PIT-NDPS provisions. Some nine hundred and twenty-three FIRs had been registered against traffickers in the span of fifty-one days. Hundreds of driving licences had been cancelled, recommendations made to revoke scores of passports, immovable properties seized and structures that were the proceeds of crime demolished. Drug stores were inspected in their thousands, licences suspended and cancelled.
This is the part the ordinary citizen sees and trusts: not a distant headline about a kingpin, but the dismantling of the small, local networks that draw a neighbourhood’s children into ruin. The police, for once, turned heavily on the peddler at the street corner — and the street corner noticed.
The Lieutenant Governor has been careful, throughout, to draw the moral line: this is not, he insists, about killing the killers in some spirit of vengeance. It is about uprooting a poison and reclaiming a generation, treating the addicted not as criminals to be discarded but as patients to be healed. Tens of thousands have already passed through treatment and counselling. Women’s committees and youth clubs have sprung up in their thousands to keep watch at the grassroots. The compassion and the crackdown are not in tension; they are two hands of the same effort.
The man and the moment
It would be dishonest to write about this movement without writing about the figure at its centre. The campaign against Manoj Sinha in the public sphere has, at times, been loud, and the propaganda against him after the formation of the elected government was considerable. Yet something has shifted in the public’s estimation of him through these hundred days. Even adversaries have conceded that no such powerful campaign against drugs has ever been launched in the region before. A leader is judged, in the end, not by the noise around him but by whether the people will walk beside him when he asks. In district after district, they have.
His own words from Kulgam capture the arc better than any commentator could: that the chains which once bound the youth of Jammu and Kashmir are being broken, and that a pledge made years ago — for a fear-free and drug-free homeland — is, at last, being honoured in the streets by the people themselves.
The road from here
A hundred days is a beginning, not an end, and the wise among the campaign’s architects know it. Habits of a generation are not undone by a single summer of walking, however glorious. The de-addiction centres must outlast the rallies; the women’s committees must keep their vigil long after the flags are folded; the police must stay heavy on the peddler when the cameras have moved on.
But for now, let the Valley have its morning. Let Kulgam keep the memory of a day that felt more like festival than fear. The tricolour was welcomed, the crowds were peaceful, the killers of the spirit were named and pursued, and a people long taught to close their shutters threw open their doors instead.
A drug-free Jammu and Kashmir, the Lieutenant Governor likes to say, is not a dream but a shared responsibility. On the evidence of these hundred days, the people have decided to share it.
