Rita F. Kurian
Kashmir, exotically beautiful is known as a paradise on Earth, considered as magnificent as Switzerland, perhaps more. However, while reminiscing on Kashmir, one is reminded of John Milton’s famous epic, “Paradise Lost” and one hopes that part 2 of Milton’s “Paradise Regained” will restore its glory.
Jammu and Kashmir, officially known as the Princely State of Kashmir and Jammu, was a princely state during the British East India Company rule as well as the British Raj in India from 1846 to 1952. A wealthy, mineral-rich state with running pure waters and a clean environment, most Kashmiris are highly educated, literate, polite, and hospitable.
The state is known for its snow-clad mountains, clear blue lakes, and, green pastures and above all, rich tourist resorts. Flourishing in natural resources, spices, and saffron, the costliest spice in the world is cultivated in Pulwama and Budgam.
In Jammu and Kashmir, the mineral resources if utilized to their fullest potential could spur on a great economic revolution to change the destiny of the people. Sapphire, precious stones, marble, minerals such as arsenic ores, bauxite, borax, coal, gold, gypsum, lignite, limestone, manganese, among others are found here.
After Pulwama, Abrogation of Article 370, and COVID-19:
Kashmir despite being a disputed zone had a high GDP with most of the wealth pouring in from tourism just before the repealing of Article 370 although troubled storms were brewing in the region after the 2019 Pulwama attack. According to scholars, after Pulwama, certain forces in authority committed extrajudicial killing, rapes, tortures, and enforced disappearances of some of the Kashmiri civilians. A lot of youth were arrested under UAPA. The police have arrested hundreds of youths without warrants under the UAPA and PSA. Hundreds detained are not yet released.
The situation has become more complicated in the midst of the ravishing pandemic and where other parts of the world can spring back to normal after controlling COVID-19, Kashmir, especially has lost all tourism after the abrogation of Article 370 and nothing right now can be done to revive it.
The government dug nose-deep into property-domicile-land issues and did not seem concerned about building up the battered economy and the lives of shattered people displaying insensitivity.
The abrogation of Article 370 came with a promise on the Floor of the Parliament in the Center to bring social harmony, prosperity, and peace but only brought in disturbances, and while Kashmiri media and voices were muffled, with the volcanic hidden smoke of anger steaming within just waiting to erupt. Over 80 civilians and over 100 jawans have lost their lives since 2019 in shootouts so troubled waters are turbulent. It is shocking that in the most militarized zone in the world, the terrorists are still able to operate with such ease. Recently,
terrorists barged into the house of the police officer SPO (special police officer), and shot him and his wife dead, while his daughter succumbed the next day.
There have been sightings of zones in three different locations in Jammu, but the intelligence is clueless as to their origins.
Suicides, Depression, and Heart Attacks, Addictions: There are over 6000 suicide cases over the decades which are alarmingly surging over the last year. Suicide cases are rising among the young and the cases are increasing. Psychiatrists report that girls as young as 12 and 13 are getting psychiatric help because and depression has hit the youth hard. Kashmir initially cut off from phone and internet, now COVID-19 lockdown is experiencing financial and emotional crises leading to a serious mental health crisis.
Mir, a youth took his life in utter frustration because his father and 150 teachers’ salaries have been withheld for nearly two years, 65 of them were ex-rebels like Mir’s father, Bashir. Many young girls and boys have taken their lives just in the last year engulfed in melancholic miseries.
Heart Attacks: Over this last year, there is a sudden escalation of heart attacks from the younger population of Jammu and Kashmir, alarming everyone as a lifestyle of not being able to exercise due to the lockdowns, stress, and depression has been the cause of sudden deaths in the young.
Drug Addictions: Years of political tensions, the turmoil of the state, and social issues have led 90% of drug abusers to belong to the age group of 17-35. Unemployment, relationship difficulties also trigger off addictions. While the state government is working to stop this, including the J&K Police Department running a number of drug de-addiction centers in the Kashmir Valley, they are not well equipped enough to take care of the huge influx of addictions and depression swirling in the Valley right now.
Economic Crash: Last year in July, J&K was among the top four states with a high jobless rate, at 16.3 percent. There is no sector of Kashmir’s economy — be it tourism, horticulture, transport, or trade — that hasn’t suffered losses in the past two years. “Economy was already on its deathbed,” said Sheikh Ashiq, President of the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI). “Somehow we were trying to survive, then came the pandemic.”
The transport industry has taken a major hit as public transport and taxis have remained off roads for much of the past two years, leaving several thousand families, like that of Wani, in economic distress. Wani said, “I don’t know how I am running my household. It’s Allah’s mercy. I borrow and feed our stomachs,” Wani said. “I am in debt, from head to toe.”
There are more than 60,000 commercial transport vehicles in Kashmir, a source of livelihood for over one lakh families. “Since last year, I haven’t paid the school fee (of his two children). The school keeps asking us but we have no money to pay them,” he said.
The economic crisis in Kashmir started with the floods in 2014, followed by the demonetization strike which hit the economy and then successive lockdowns, said Manzoor Ahmad Mir, president of the Regal Chowk Traders Association. “Series of events over the years broke the back of traders,” he lamented.
Traders in the Regal Chowk area, in the bustling business hub of Srinagar, are in the swamps and Mir said, “I think traders in this part of the city have faced more than 100% loss.”
Kashmir overall suffers losses of thousands of crore rupees on a daily basis, Ashiq, the KCCI president said. “Economic losses in Kashmir in the last year were about ₹40,000 crores… Since the second COVID-19 lockdown, the daily loss is around ₹3000 crore loss,” he said. “Exports have also suffered a loss of more than 50 percent.”
Even as markets reopened later in 2020, the crippling impact of successive lockdowns made it difficult for businesses to spring back. Between June 2020 and March 2021, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), more than five lakh — 5,69,476 — lost their jobs.
In December last year, a 28-year-old contractor in south Kashmir’s advertisement in a local newspaper, offering his kidney on sale, had stunned Kashmir. “Maybe I would have been able to work and repay the loan but after the abrogation and pandemic induced lockdowns and economic crisis, I couldn’t find any work,” he had said.
The unemployment rate in Kashmir, a month before the August clampdown, was about 14.74 percent but drastically rose in the next six months to 21.08 percent, according to the CMIE. From an estimated 35,63,557 employed in the region, today there are about 29,94,081.
The local trade during the current lockdown, said Yasin Khan, president of the Kashmir Traders and Manufacturers Federation, is suffering losses of “₹150 crores rupees per day.” The financial health of businesses in Kashmir, he said, “is at its worst”.
Owing to the overall economic crisis, the public’s spending power had also declined, said Khan, saying that when the lockdown was lifted last winter, there was no rush of buyers. “The rush that would be in markets earlier is nowhere to be found,” said Khan. “People don’t have the spending power to afford things.
Shopian, the apple bowl of the country as the district’s apple orchards are developed over 21,676 hectares, making it the chief apple producer after south Kashmir’s Anantnag district. Kashmir produces about two million tonnes of apples, almost two-thirds of which is exported was damaged due to lockdown and also unexpected snowfall to the orchards in early November last year caused a loss of about ₹500 crore in the region.
In the third lockdown, there are no signs of economic revival on the horizon. The houseboat owners, hoteliers, transporters, and many from the informal economy are all deserted and the area looks like a marooned island.
For all traders, it is a matter of survival as the region has been struck by the unprecedented second wave of the pandemic in March. Jammu and Kashmir are witnessing more than 3000 cases every day and over 50 deaths on average.
Ashiq, the KCCI president said that Kashmir’s “economy is declining every year” and that “we are not seeing any improvement. Just decline.”
“It feels like there is a war going on,” Ashiq said. “Let us first come out of this pandemic to finally hope for the revival.”
Kashmiris Want a Corrupt Free Government: A corruption-free Jammu and Kashmir was the promise of the Center after August 5, but recent social audits revealed that corruption continues to thrive across civic bodies. Post-August 5th, nepotism, misgovernance, and corruption have grown with government officials smirking in arrogance, and deceitfulness, devoid of accountability.
It is said that several institutions of transparency and probity, such as the State Information Commission (SIC), the State Human Rights Commission (SHRC), and State Vigilance Commission (SVC) have been shut. The J&K RTI Act 2009, which was a more progressive law than the RTI Act 2005, was also repealed in spite of the fact that 166 J&K state laws are still protected.
Over the last four or five years, subsidized rations meant for the poor were sold to them at exorbitant rates. Hundreds of poor consumers had not been told that they are entitled to rice for Rs 3 per kilo under the National Food Security Act (NFSA). Instead, they were provided with fake ration cards, often by shopkeepers marked Above Poverty Line (APL) and Non-Priority Households (NPHH), which meant they had to pay a lot more for rations than they should have.
In Conclusion:
We all agree that the pandemic has destroyed the world’s health system, broken spirits, and economically handicapped millions. It has been a tough haul for all. The world also got a taste of what it is to be in a lockdown for a prolonged period of time, such as Kashmir was, for three years and it is agreed that such long lockdowns wreck the economy and also bring in depression waves of hopelessness.
While lockdown in the world of two years disrupted lives and finances, Kashmir, the most militarized zone in a disputed state with over three years lockdown has devastated lives. Some even want to leave Kashmir, but where will they go? Was the purpose of the abrogation of Article 370 and 35-A to drown the people into sinking sands or build a better future? Right now, everyone is clueless as to what is happening and one can only conclude, three years of lockdown have reduced the princely state to a begging bowl.