The Tourism Ministry’s dream to turn Jammu into a thriving tourist destination seems to have been a non-starter, partly due to the lackadaisical attitude of the tourism department that has failed to develop the sites of Buddhist ruins, and partly due to opposition from villagers who are loath to further excavations. The different wings of the Jammu & Kashmir government have failed to explore Jammu’s richest Buddhist circuits and bring them on the tourism map despite the Tourism Ministry including J&K in its nationwide Buddhist circuit project a few years ago.
Buddhist period ruins discovered at Ambran on the banks of river Chenab have not been connected to the rest of the Buddhist circuit in the state, as villagers living around the site are opposed to excavation.
“We could get a huge tourist flow from South East Asia, especially Myanmar and Japan, if the entire Buddhist circuit of J&K comes on the tourism map,” Zahoor Ahmed, deputy director of tourism, lamented while talking to The Sunday Guardian.
The reluctance of the political class to take on the villagers was cited as a reason for the delay. “We could not explore the site (at Ambran) as the land around the site is owned by the villagers. There is a lot of political pressure and as of today we have dropped the idea,” a senior official of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) told this newspaper, hinting at the role played by those in power.
However, the villagers retorted that the ASI is concocting stories of villagers’ resistance to hide its failure. “They should give us compensatory land and we will have no issues after that. They promised us alternative land, but it was never given,” said Satpal Sharma, a resident of Ambran village.
Many archaeologists in J&K believe that a hitherto unknown civilisation is buried under the Ambran site, with its roots linked to the Harappan civilisation.
The ASI team, during the excavation in the year 2000, had found artifacts of the Kushan period belonging to the eighth century. They discovered a stupa and rooms for monks at the site. The state government is clueless about any dispute between the ASI and the villagers. “I have not been informed about any such dispute and I will check if we have to provide alternative land to the villagers,” a senior administrative official told this newspaper from Jammu.