Let’s begin with an admission: I have never really experienced life-threatening floods in spite of having spent a good part of my life in Assam. Yes, the roads often get waterlogged after every extended shower in Guwahati and the whole city smells and looks like a massive sewage pit, but it’s not really lethal or anything. The city has a deplorable drainage system, the constructors and keepers of which have steadily gotten richer over the years, but the city’s residents have come to terms with it and treat it like a first world problem. It happens once or twice a year, causes inconvenience – but it’s not really something that kills.

However, I did hear horrific flood-related stories ­- from friends in Dhemaji, Dibrugarh, Lakhimpur, Jorhat, Morigaon, etc. (they are names of districts in Assam, in case you’re wondering). Stories about entire families being washed away, pregnant women staying put on bamboo rafts for days on end, with no food or drinking water, waiting for the water to recede. All of us have seen rhinos and deer being mowed down by traffic on NH-37, as they move to higher land from the forests of the Kaziranga which gets submerged at least once every monsoon. The Brahmaputra can be savage, and history has stood testament to this.

Let’s go over some specific instances.

August 2014: 12 lakh people were affected – and 9 killed – in floods that affected 16 districts in Assam. Only a little more than 40,000 people – around three per cent of the total affected – could make it to the state-administered relief camps.

June 2014: Floods affected 20,000 people across five districts on the north bank of the Brahmaputra.

July 2013:  Flash floods forced nearly 250,000 people to leave their homes. More than 35 villages in Dhemaji were completely submerged.

July 2012: At least 77 people were killed and nearly two million affected by floods that hit the entire north bank of the Brahmaputra.

These are, of course, only incidents of serious flooding in the state in the past three years – and the list and numbers are neither exhaustive nor comprehensive.  More importantly, these are events from an era when the media, after having consistently received flak for not reporting on the northeast enough, started to sneak in 200-word snippets and agency-borrowed clips with clichéd headlines and predictable tickers in national newspapers and prime-time news.

The idea here, as many of you would think, is not to harp on about how the northeast is not reported enough. People wiser and much more knowledgeable than me have written reams on it, and there isn’t anything ground-breaking or new I am capable of adding. The idea, in fact, is to understand what goes into the making of a “tragedy” and what legitimises the said tragedy to do what it is meant to: invoke unquestioning sympathy and, in this case, media and governmental attention.

I’d concede here that I have had more than a moment of doubt as I set out to write this piece. I have close friends from Jammu and Kashmir, and less than two months back stayed with the family of one of them while on a visit to Srinagar. I was extended the best possible hospitality for which I will be forever grateful. They had to be evacuated from their house and the friend, who works in Delhi, couldn’t contact them for three days. All of us breathed a huge sigh of relief when he finally got in touch on Wednesday, confirming that all’s well.

However, I can’t help but feel a little dismayed that for several of my acquaintances from Dhemaji – the lush plains of which are savaged by the Brahmaputra every year – the concern levels for their families stranded in floods have never been the same, in spite of going through equally harrowing and uncertain times. Dhemaji, for one, has borne the brunt of ravenous floods so routinely that people have even stopped complaining. And, crude as it may sound, the level of representation Kashmir valley has in Delhi’s journalistic circles, has, without a doubt, a lot to do with it. It is only fair that Kashmiris in newsrooms forward the case of their home state, but does it mean that the importance and attention a natural disaster receives is contingent on how you project it? And more importantly, if that’s the case, is it fair? Senior journalists from news channels have rushed to Kashmir to report from the ground, but you’d hardly see a Barkha Dutt or a Rahul Kanwal rushing to Assam when floods hit – and they do, very often.

Lest this is misconstrued as an Assam versus Kashmir debate owing to my Assamese nativity, let’s look at a few other instances of serious flooding in India in recent years.

August 2014: Floods killed 34 and affected nearly 10 lakh people across 1,553 villages of 89 blocks in 23 districts of Orissa.

August 2014: 2.25 lakh people were hit in the nine districts of Bihar when the Kosi overflowed. The Hindu reported that women were forced to relieve themselves in the open in the absence of sufficient relief camps.

September 2013: Around 160 people died and 5.4 million were affected due to floods in 20 districts in Bihar.

Again, this is a highly selective list – and there have been many more cases of serious flooding in the last two years.

Social media, with an aggressively propagated Kashmir Floods hashtag, has played an important role in identifying stranded victims and guiding rescue teams to them. (At the time of writing the article, the toll in Kashmir was approximately 200 people dead and around 6 lakh affected.) It is indeed commendable that people on Twitter have put aside political differences to spread the word. The question is, would the case have been the same had it not been Kashmir: a region, for the lack of a better word, so sexy, apropos conflict and disaster and ridiculous levels of pop patriotism? Because apart from the Uttarakhand floods of last year (and they’re only second to the 2004 Tsunami), I didn’t see the same levels of concern on either social or conventional media about floods in a Bihar or an Orissa – places that pale in comparison to Kashmir and its prestige quotient in the average Indian’s mind.

Also, there can be little argument that the Kashmir disaster is being seen as the new government’s first serious attempt at crisis management. The Prime Minister has responded promptly, declaring the floods a “national tragedy”.  (This while also managing to be photographed air-dropping rations to those stranded in the floods.) The army has swung into action with an efficiency only they are capable of, triggering off debates on whether Kashmiris are being “grateful enough” after a rescue team was allegedly stone-pelted. There is a very strong sub-text to this line of discourse, considering the Bharatiya Janata Party’s stance on the Kashmir conflict.  Is it being seen as an opportune occasion to position the Army, which doesn’t exactly share very cordial relations with the people of the state, as a friendly entity? An organisation which, in spite of innumerable stones and rebuffs, wants to mend  bridges that have been created as a result of two decades of distrust (and allegedly innumerable killings and rapes).  Or is this a well-timed exercise by a conservative government (and a media armed with a newly discovered-jingoism) to mainstream-ise local sentiments? Closer to Kashmir, the 2010 disastrous cloudburst in Leh didn’t garner even a fraction of this interest. Could it be because we’re not competing with Pakistan for their attention?

With separatist demands having considerably waned in Assam, the government doesn’t need to re-invent the image of the Army as a friendly people-serving organisation there. Is that then the reason floods in Assam do not receive the same urgency of action from the Central government? While this argument may come across as unlikely and even far-fetched, the ultra-nationalist questioning in some of mainstream media about whether the people of Kashmir have been “grateful enough”, does suggest rather explicitly that it is not. In its concern and care for the flood victims, mainland India seems to expect – or may I say even demand – a certain sense of and gratitude – and loyalty –from Kashmiris in lieu. And we all know what loyalty means in this context.

Kashmir is in the middle of a grave predicament – there are no two questions about it, and it deserves all possible aid. It would be nice though if #FloodsInDhemaji also trended on Twitter on some of the many occasions when the district lies submerged. And if our prime-time journalists could hotfoot it there as well and wade through its waters while reporting on the calamity. And it’s hardly so difficult – surely the Army, which has, for some reason, so willingly carried journalists in rescue helicopters in Kashmir, would more than willingly do the same in Assam too. It’s good PR after all.