By Dr Waseem Ahmad Bhat
“Floods have returned to the Valley.” This anxious sentence has once again begun to circulate in Jammu and Kashmir as the region witnesses surging waters, swollen rivers, and flash floods disrupting lives across districts. For many Kashmiris, the memory of September 2014 remains raw—the devastating flood that submerged Srinagar, destroyed thousands of homes, and paralysed the economy for months. Since then, smaller but disruptive flash floods and cloudbursts have become a recurring reality, washing away roads, damaging orchards, and sweeping through villages with alarming frequency. Now, in 2024–25, the cycle seems to repeat itself: heavy rainfall events are testing the fragile urban infrastructure and reviving fears of another catastrophe.
It is within this backdrop that we must place Kashmir’s climate story. Every summer or winter, when an unusually hot or cold day strikes, the Meteorological Department and media outlets rush to inform us: “This is the hottest day in 50 years” or “The coldest in 70 years.” Such pronouncements provoke associations with global warming, for we live in an era marked by rapid industrialisation, relentless consumerism, nuclear arsenals, and expanding transportation networks—all contributing to ecological degradation. Yet, a paradox lingers beneath these headlines. If today’s extremes are attributed to anthropogenic climate change, why did similar extremes occur decades ago, in the 1940s or 1950s, when the world was not yet engulfed by such levels of technological expansion and fossil-fuel dependence? How do we reconcile the recurrence of such phenomena across radically different historical contexts?
The historical record shows that extreme weather in Kashmir is not a novelty of our times. For instance, Srinagar recorded a staggering 38.3 °C on July 10, 1946, and nearly repeated it at 37.7 °C in July 1953. Both instances occurred long before the global surge in greenhouse gas emissions. Likewise, in February 2016, the Valley experienced its hottest February in seventy-six years, registering 20.6 °C and surpassing the previous benchmark set in 1940. These examples demonstrate that extremes have always been part of Kashmir’s climatic rhythm, shaped by natural factors such as solar cycles, volcanic activity, and atmospheric oscillations. From the freezing winters noted by nineteenth-century travellers, when rivers turned to solid ice, to the occasional scorching summers that destroyed orchards, the Valley has long been a site of climatic unpredictability.
What differentiates the present moment, however, is not the existence of extremes but their intensification, recurrence, and the devastating new forms they take—like the floods that now punctuate Kashmiri life. The Valley has in recent years witnessed a cascade of record-breaking temperatures alongside catastrophic rainfall events. Srinagar registered its hottest May in nearly sixty years at 34.4 °C, followed by its hottest June day in two decades at 35.5 °C. In July 2024, Srinagar recorded 36.2 °C, the hottest July day in twenty-five years, while September 2023 marked the second-hottest September in over a century. In parallel, extreme precipitation events—cloudbursts in Ganderbal and Kulgam, flash floods in Kupwara and Baramulla, and now widespread inundations reminiscent of 2014—have become disturbingly frequent. These are not isolated spikes but part of a broader pattern. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has confirmed that heatwaves which once occurred once in fifty years now appear at least five times more often, while shifts in atmospheric systems like the weakening jet stream are altering the behaviour of cold spells and rainfall cycles.
In the Himalayan region, these changes carry profound ecological and political implications. Glacial retreat has disrupted water flows, threatening both agriculture and hydropower. Deforestation and unplanned urbanisation in the Valley have aggravated microclimatic stress, while shifts in Western Disturbances have rendered winters unpredictable, with snowfall either arriving too late or not at all. The disappearance of natural springs and the drying up of rivers further expose the vulnerability of an already fragile ecosystem. Floods, once rare in living memory, now seem to recur every few years, overwhelming an already stressed administration and highlighting the absence of effective urban planning. In such a context, meteorological announcements about “record-breaking days” or “highest rainfall in decades” are not simply statistical curiosities—they are symptomatic of deeper environmental disruptions that threaten livelihoods, traditions, and local economies.
To fully grasp this shift, it is necessary to move beyond scientific explanation and attend to the politics of interpretation. Here a postmodern perspective becomes valuable. In the past, an extreme weather event was interpreted as an anomaly, a natural outlier. Today, the same event is instantly woven into the discourse of climate crisis. The change lies not only in atmospheric conditions but also in how we narrate and politicise them. Climate extremes, in other words, are not only physical phenomena but also cultural texts through which societies articulate anxieties about modernity, development, and survival. In Kashmir, these anxieties are layered upon the already politicised terrain of conflict and governance, making environmental narratives inseparable from broader struggles over resources, rights, and identity.
This interpretive shift also reflects what postmodern theorists like Lyotard call the “incredulity towards metanarratives.” While earlier generations accepted weather as a cyclical expression of nature, contemporary society situates each extreme within the global metanarrative of climate change. At the same time, competing micro-narratives—whether religious, cultural, or political—infuse local meaning into these events. When an elderly woman laments the drying up of springs in Kashmir as a spiritual punishment, or when policymakers attribute heatwaves and floods to deforestation and urban sprawl, these voices remind us that climate knowledge is co-produced, fragmented, and contested.
Reconciling historical extremes with contemporary experiences therefore requires a double acknowledgement. On the one hand, nature has always produced weather anomalies independent of human intervention. On the other, the systemic amplification of such anomalies in recent decades is inseparable from human activity. What were once outliers have now become trends, and it is the political work of naming, framing, and interpreting them that transforms weather into climate crisis. For Kashmir, this means that a hot day is no longer just a hot day, nor a flood merely a natural accident; both are now signposts of an altered ecological order and warnings of the costs of continued inaction.
Ultimately, the question is not whether climate extremes occurred in the past—they undoubtedly did. The more pressing concern is why they are becoming structural features of the present, materialising in cycles of droughts, floods, and heatwaves that destabilise communities. In recognising this, we are compelled to see meteorological records not merely as technical data but as political texts that reflect how we, as societies, choose to make sense of environmental change. In the Valley, as in much of the world, these extremes are thus more than weather; they are mirrors of our political condition, telling us not only about warming temperatures and rising waters but also about the fragility of our collective future.
The author is an Assistant Professor of Social Science at Akal University Talwandi Sabo Bathinda. He can be reached at waseembhat94@gmail.com
