Bunkers in a Border Village
In Degwar, a border village in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district, residents expand housing by going underground in makeshift bunkers.
Photographs by Ahmed Mir; Design By Neha Shekhawat
Degwar village, in Jammu and Kashmir’s Poonch district is one of the last settlements on the Indian side of the Line of Control (LoC). On the horizon are the Pir Pinjal mountains – Pakistani settlements visible from the village on their ridgeline.
The Line of Control, affirmed as a result of the Simla Agreement at the end of the Indo-Pak War of 1971, acts as the de-facto border separating the Indian-administered side of Jammu and Kashmir from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Degwar is a particularly sensitive area, prone to frequent violations of a 2003 ceasefire agreement between India and Pakistan that aimed to stabilize the situation between the two nations. With a population of 2,916 according to the 2011 Census, it lies directly in the crosshairs when tensions – seemingly inevitably – escalate. In Degwar, even periods of relative calm are tinged with fear, prompted by frequent sightings of surveillance drones in the skies.
In May 2025, India and Pakistan were locked in a four-day conflict, following the Pahalgam terror attack and India’s retaliatory Operation Sindoor. The cross-border escalation claimed at least fifteen lives in Poonch and forced mass migration to safer areas. Mukammad Akram was one of the civilians killed in Poonch. His eight-year-old son, Muhammad Haroon, stands outside their house in Poonch, with shelling damage visible in the background.
That Degwar escaped human casualties and mostly suffered structural damage in 2025 is a matter of chance; its geographic position renders its residents perpetually vulnerable to crossborder violence. In 2020 alone, Degwar reported at least three fatalities.
In a 2024 paper, academic Zahid Khan quotes an interviewee in Krishna Ghati, who asks: “Why are these two nations battling on our farmland?” A group of students enrolled in a government school in Balakot says, “We cannot have permanence in our lives if we do not have a permanent home.” An anonymous source, described as an educated farmer from Poonch, stresses that for those living on the border, this identity cannot be separated from their lives, and that a temporary ceasefire does not take away the deeper social, psychological, and economic challenges people continue to endure.
The memory of violence remains in the form of shrapnel, which the villagers preserve for posterity. “What was once a weapon now lies as a silent token of human cruelty,” says Rizwan Khan, a twenty-six year-old visual artist from Poonch. Khan travelled to several villages to collect shrapnel and other objects as signifiers of the artillery shelling from May 2025. This is his self-portrait from the exercise.
Among the youngest of the hobbyists is Mohd. Sadiq, an 8-year-old, who keeps a piece of shrapnel. He found it in the debris of his house’s verandah, which was damaged in the shelling.
Agha Shahid Ali, in his poem ‘Farewell’, writes of Kashmir as a homeland that is not only distant to people who no longer live there, but even to those who do. Kashmir, as he sees it, has a home crisis—structures that are supposed to protect no longer have any sense of permanence.
“In this country we step out with doors in our arms
Children run out with windows in their arms”
A bunker is a facility designed to shield people during military shelling, strikes, or gunfire. The Indian Army has a well-established blueprint for bunkers to protect its soldiers. In his memoir Curfewed Night, Basharat Peer writes about the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, Srinagar: “It is several thousand military bunkers, four golf courses, and three bookshops…” A few militarized zones across the world have government bunkers designated for civilians, but Degwar is not one of them.
Now, Degwar residents have begun building their own private bunkers, modelled after the Indian Army’s. They’re designed to protect families from LoC crossfire on short notice. But while army bunkers contain basic necessities like bedding, emergency food supplies, water, toilets, and a communication device to safeguard soldiers for up to 72 hours at a stretch, civilian-built private bunkers are much more fragile. Often, their capacity is directly proportional to a family’s life savings – which in Degwar are increasingly directed toward the literal purpose of saving lives.
Chowdhary Rakhmaddin, sixty-five, sits with his grandson beside the entrance of their bunker. A retired armymen, he was the first in Degwar to build a private bunker to protect his family. He came up with the idea based on his two-decade service in the Indian army. “The community bunker [a civilian’s house where community members congregate during shelling incidents] is too far from my house to reach in time, so I spent ₹3 lakh from my pension savings to build my own,” Rakhmaddin says. His bunker is 9 feet deep, reinforced with a 1.5-foot-thick double lintel and an overground kitchen to make it as safe as possible in case of shelling. No matter how expensive a house is, he adds, it cannot survive a shelling if directly hit.
In many ways, bunkers are a natural extension of what civilians have always done to survive wars and militarized zones. During the 1993 Bashlibel tragedy, a massacre of Azerbaijani civilians committed by Armenian armed forces in the Kalbajar district, villagers hid in natural caves to protect themselves from armed violence.
However, private bunkers aren't natural formations or government structures, which risks placing them in a liminal space. In their article titled ‘The Dangerous Rise of “Dual-Use” Objects in War’ for the Yale Law Journal, Azmat Khan et al report on how modern armies frequently hit civilian places like power stations by branding them as “dual-use,” even as international law doesn’t recognize such a category. Focusing on U.S. strikes since 1991, it shows how civilians pay the price—urging clearer rules to protect people in war.
Bihari Lal Sharma, seventy eight, is a retired government schoolteacher, whose family traces its ancestral roots in Degwar before Partition. “I have lived through the wars of 1965 and 1971 between India and Pakistan, but I had never seen shelling of this scale before,” he says, referring to the 2025 conflict. “My grandchildren had come from Jammu to visit us. They were so traumatized because of the shelling on the night of May 7 that they had to be taken back to Jammu the next morning.” His grandchildren are back now, exploring the bunker he has since built for them.
Building a private bunker in Degwar is neither cheap nor easy. Roads don’t reach houses—making it even more difficult to access a JCB to begin construction. Sharma invested around ₹4 lakh, over a period of almost six months to build his bunker, without the help of experts.
But most expertise might have been inadequate. Building a durable war bunker that can withstand high-level artillery attacks requires expertise beyond that of regular civil engineers. In a press release dated 5th Mar 2025, researchers at IIT Madras developed a framework for missile resistant panels, using finite element simulations, performance-based damage states, and Bayesian probabilistic modelling. Dr. Alagappan Ponnalagu, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Madras, said, “Our future work is to extend this study to develop much needed lightweight, cost-effective and sustainable blast and ballistic resistant modular panels that can be used in the construction of bunkers along the borders and highly inaccessible areas for the Indian Army.”
Measuring 12×12ft, Sharma's bunker can now house all of his family – but only after two attempts to build and rebuild it due to faulty construction. Building and upkeep is a process of trial and error; a process which is only feasible, if at all, by retirees with no formal civil engineering or construction experience, but with the time and life savings or pension to spend. “Now I have plastered the insides of the bunker and equipped it with electricity,” Sharma added. This is the best case scenario as far as private bunkers are concerned.
Other conflict zones are beginning to budget for bunkers as a form of civilian protection. In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany is expected to spend around €10 billion on modernizing civil protection, alert systems, and emergency infrastructure, aiming to be war-ready by 2029. And recently, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky filmed a message from deep inside an old Soviet-era bunker in Kyiv — for many Ukrainians, this came to embody the way ordinary people were learning to survive the bombardment overhead.
The best-case scenario for surviving shelling in Jammu and Kashmir is to hide in your own bunker until help comes. In 2025, a few hours away from Degwar, Madan Lal, 62, a resident of Rajouri’s Nowshera, survived what he described as the worst shelling since 2002 by sheltering for twenty hours in an underground bunker he built near his house, before the police eventually evacuated him and his family in a bullet-proof vehicle.
Not much has improved since. In June 2025, an RTI by Jammu-based activist Raman Kumar revealed that the Jammu and Kashmir administration had utilised only 53.42% of the ₹242.77 crores allocated to the Union Territory administration to build bunkers between 2020–21 and 2024–25. During his tenure as Union Home Minister, now-Defence Minister Rajnath Singh promised to build individual bunkers for residents in border districts like Poonch. In a memorandum dated 28th May 2018, Singh directed ₹415 crores for construction of more than 14,000 bunkers in Kathua, Samba, Jammu, Rajouri and Poonch districts, out of which more than 13,000 were supposed to be individual bunkers, which were to be constructed by public agencies such as the National Buildings Construction Corporation (NBCC) and aided by the Public Works Department (PWD) and Rural Development Department at the local level. At the time of reporting, however, Degwar is yet to see a government bunker. Residents without resources have to make do with what they can.
Mushtaq Hussain is a 40-year-old labourer whose house is within walking distance of the Line of Control. Unable to afford hired labour, Mushtaq has built the bunker largely with his own hands, with limited assistance from a relative. He has exhausted around ₹1.75 lakh from his savings to build it, but it remains under-equipped and unfinished. “We live in such a sensitive zone, susceptible to escalations around the border. The government is responsible for our safety but we are compelled to look out for ourselves even when a trolley of construction material costs around ₹10,000,” he says.
When the LoC fence was bombarded during the shelling, the impact damaged his house and killed one of his cattle animals. But he has nowhere else to go. Degwar is an improvement compared to Hussain's previous residence in Noorkot, a village in no-man’s-land (a largely uninhabited zone acting as a neutral, demilitarized buffer between the two countries’ border forces). “Property in Degwar is difficult to sell because of its proximity to the LoC, and land prices in Poonch city are far too high for me. What’s the point of relocating? It’s not like shelling doesn’t reach the city," he says.
Hussain’s bunker is engraved with the words “Tabarak Allah,” Arabic for “blessed is God”. This structure is all that stands between his children and the LoC, situated on his bunker’s immediate left.
As private bunkers turn into a matter-of-fact extension of housing, villagers’ safety is increasingly privatized. Which means that many of them have nothing with which to build their own bunkers, and no prospects for shelter in public bunkers that may never be built.
Majeed belongs to the Bakarwal community, a nomadic Muslim community highly dependent on their livestock which migrates to higher altitudes in summers. The Bakarwals are classified as a Scheduled Tribe in Jammu and Kashmir. Government estimates, such as the 2020 Economic Survey of J&K, show that over 42 per cent of the Union Territory’s Scheduled Tribe population, comprising largely Gujjars and Bakarwals, lives below the poverty line. When asked if he plans to build his own bunker, Majeed laughs it off and says, “I haven’t thought about it yet;” flanked only by his sheepdog and grazing flock.
“Our safety is a very valid issue; I haven’t made it up. The government is busy with communal politics in the plains of mainland where golas (shells) do not reach,” says Rakhmaddin, pointing at Pakistani settlements visible on the ridgeline. “We are left to fend for ourselves.” His grandson, standing at their bunker’s entrance, listens in silence.
On his plans to relocate to a safer, less-sensitive zone, Rakhmaddin reaffirms his faith in God and adds, “It’s all Allah’s will. If he wants me to live, I will stay safe here. But if he wants me dead, I would rather die inside my bunker than out in the open.”
This isn’t an isolated belief in Poonch. Many living along the LoC believe that bunkers offer a dignified death. They prevent the disfiguration of their loved ones’ bodies that would otherwise occur on open land. When all else fails, then, a bunker turns into a necessity for grief and letting go, when death in the borderlands seems inevitable.
Lal Ded, a highly revered fourteenth-century mystic of Kashmiri Shaivism, composed around 285 vakhs or poems. In one of them, originally in Kashmiri and translated by Jayalal Kaul, she talks about how people continue to survive in places not meant to be fit as a residential space, a sentiment that echoes life in a border village like Degwar:
“In the hollow of a cow’s horn, though there is little room, the bee still builds its comb and stores honey.”
Ahmed Mir is a freelance journalist from Poonch, Jammu and Kashmir. Sarthak Parashar is a freelance journalist based in Delhi. He writes about cinema, conflict, culture, and more.