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February 8, 2004
EXCERPTS: How the other half lives
From alienation with the government of India the people of Kashmir descended into the abyss of violence brought on by militancy. Parvez Dewan, resident commissioner of Indian Kashmir, sheds light on what is happening in the Valley
Upon the Sheikh’s (Sheikh Abdullah’s) death, the National Conference unanimously elected his son, Dr Farooq Abdullah, as chief minister...
However, Dr Farooq’s overwhelming majority in the state assembly was of no use. From the beginning of 1984, the local press was full of reports that Delhi was trying to get Dr Farooq’s legislators to defect. On Sunday July 2, 1984, Dr Farooq went to Gulmarg for a couple of hours with his family and film actress Shabana Azmi. During those few, brief hours his brother-in-law, G.M. Shah, was installed as the chief minister of the state. Mr Shah and a few NC legislators had joined forces with the state unit of the Indian National Congress. Together they managed to put together the number of legislators required to get Dr Farooq dismissed.
The government knew that there would be a violent response from the people. So it deployed paramilitary forces all over Srinagar and some major towns. However, such was the people’s anger that the forces were not sufficient to control the situation. Between July 2 and the end of October, when government offices shifted to Jammu for the winter, several parts of Srinagar could only be ruled by imposing curfew there.
Anti-India sentiments, which had almost vanished in the nine preceding years, made a modest comeback.
Alienation
Added to this was the feeling among Kashmiri Muslims that the government of India was discriminating against them in matters of employment. G.N. Gauhar writes that in 1976, “I convinced... (the then Union) Minister for Information and Broadcasting about the disproportionate bulk recruited from the Kashmiri Pandit minority, constituting less than five per cent of the entire population, especially in the State branches of the I&B Ministry.” At that time, of the employees of certain government of India departments in Kashmir, 58 per cent were Kashmiri Pandits and 36 per cent were Muslims. Of these 36 per cent, the biggest chunk, according to Gauhar, were peons and others in the lowest rungs.
Part of the explanation lay in the difference in literacy levels. The tiny Kashmiri Pandit community is almost entirely literate. Literacy among the Muslims ranged between Budgam’s 18 per cent and Srinagar’s 34 per cent even in 1981. In the period covered by Gauhar (1947 to 1976) it was much worse. And yet there can be no explanation other than Gauhar’s for the glaring under-representation of Muslims in post offices, in the office of the accountant-general and several other central departments. In several offices, recruitment was made for considerations other than merit.
In 1990, the greater part of the Kashmiri Pandit community migrated from Kashmir to Jammu and other parts of India. The working of post offices in particular was crippled for several years after that.
Employment under the government of India accounts for a very small fraction of total government employment. The overwhelming bulk is under the state government. Gauhar notes that “two high-powered committees headed by retired chief justices of India were appointed to probe and suggest measures when the Pandit community alleged discrimination (against the Hindus by the Muslim-majority state government).”
The militarization of society: The Mughals took all of three years (1586-89) to establish their authority in Kashmir. They banned the possession of all kinds of weapons: including long kitchen knives. They searched every house (especially basements) where they thought they might find weapons. By 1589, there wasn’t a single weapon left in private hands in the plains of Kashmir. (The hills were similarly rid of weapons a few years later.)
From 1589 to 1989 Kashmir was a uniquely peaceful society. Then suddenly a friendly neighbour flooded Kashmir with Kalashnikovs, grenades and landmines. Very few of these weapons were used against the various forces of the government. As the statistics show, most of those who were killed were ordinary civilians, and not soldiers, policemen or even militants.
Guns have been used to settle private disputes in Pakistan’s Punjab and Frontier provinces for several centuries now. Even Indian Punjab and western Uttar Pradesh have known some armed violence between individuals. The 1990s brought this culture to Kashmir. Militants who had surrendered themselves to the authorities, or had otherwise given up militancy, became a major social phenomenon. They knew how to use guns. There was no shortage of ammunition. So they started using their new found skills to grab land, mow down forests, extort money and kidnap young women.
Education: Because of disturbed conditions at home, Kashmiri Muslim students started seeking admission to colleges outside the state. Those with good grades went to Delhi. The children of the rich favoured the medical and engineering colleges of Manipal and Pune. Some even sent their children to study at hole-in-the-wall training institutes in Jammu, a city that they would, till 1989, deride for its educational and intellectual backwardness.
Districts that stayed away from militancy reaped the peace dividend. The most notable of these was overwhelmingly Muslim Kargil (in Ladakh). Educational standards and levels of literacy zoomed upwards in Jammu and Kathua (both in Jammu province) as well as in Leh and Kargil (both in Ladakh). Those in militancy-hit Kashmir, too, improved, but not as rapidly as in Jammu and Ladakh. The relative ranks of four of the six districts of the Valley, including Srinagar itself, declined. The other two were static. Budgam’s position at the bottom, for instance, remained unchanged.
Thanks to determined efforts by the government, despite militancy the education sector of the state as a whole moved up from the 13th rank that it had occupied among 27 Indian states in 1991, to the 9th position in 2001. This was the biggest upward movement for any state in the 1990s.
Education, as we know, is very different from literacy. In the latter regard the state is still the second worst in the country, with a literacy level (53.57 per cent) only slightly higher than that of Pakistan.
Property: When first time visitors come to Kashmir, they expect to find bombed out houses, craters on roads, and shops with bare shelves. Why don’t they find all this?
The reason why Kashmir is not full of craters is because the government keeps rebuilding much of what is destroyed. Between 1988 and 1997, the militants burned down schools (758 of them), bridges (243) and hospitals (nine). They also destroyed 1,264 other government-owned buildings, 9,309 private houses and 1,659 private shops. Almost all of what they razed to the ground had been built between 1947 and 1989. Tourist bungalows constructed painstakingly over the decades in the remotest of hills were particularly favourite targets, including a heritage, early 20th-century, royal guest-house in Qazigund.
Between 1947 and 1991, the state had built the 5th best infrastructure in all of India. After a decade of militancy the state dropped to number 10 in 2001. This was the biggest drop in rank for any Indian state during that period.
Developmental activities in the Valley slowed down, especially in the first five or six years of militancy.
The economy: When Amy Waldman of The New York Times visited Kashmir in the summer of 2002, she noticed that the road from the airport into Srinagar was “lined with mansions, many of them brand new, that would not look out of place in Westchester County.” She later learnt that “There (were) 21,000 cars in Srinagar alone — a fivefold increase from 1990. There were 560 private schools in the valley seven years ago; there are 1,360 now.” Waldman then researched the Jammu and Kashmir Bank and called it “the most successful institution in the state and the most vivid emblem of Kashmir’s boom. Since militancy began, its deposits have grown from $458 million to $2.29 billion.” Her visits to the jewellery shops of Srinagar revealed a similar spurt in affluence.
Waldman’s observations were extremely perceptive. Despite thirteen years of militancy, the State was the country’s eighth best consumer market even in 2001. Of course, before militancy its rank had been higher still: the state had ranked 5th in 1991. Had Waldman been able to compare Kashmir’s legendary wedding feasts before and after militancy, she would have noticed that the lavishness of the feasts had increased further in the 1990s. Mineral water bottles, soft drinks and bigger portions of curd (yogurt) are only three of the new items that were added during this period.
So, has Kashmir been going through militancy or an economic boom?
The answer is: both. The impact of militancy on the economy has been mixed — and seemingly contradictory. Only two sectors of the economy actually hit the reverse gear: tourism and industry. Till 1989, tourism was not only the biggest sector after agriculture-horticulture, but also the biggest urban employer. Between 1990 and 1996, tourism in the Valley was close to zero. However, it started reviving in 1997. Early 1999 was a boom year, when there weren’t enough beds to cope with the rush of tourists. After the Kargil war of 1999, tourism slumped again. Day-to-day business in Kashmir also suffered. Friday is the Islamic Sabbath. However, secular Kashmir has chosen to observe its weekly holiday on Sundays. Between 1990 and 1996 (and, sometimes, after 1996 as well), militants would ensure that shops were shut on Fridays (in addition to Sundays). They would frequently ask businessmen to pull down their shutters on other days, too, to show the world that at least the business community obeyed their orders. According to one estimate, during the twelve years between late 1989 and 2001, the militants were able to shut businesses down for the equivalent of three and a half years. (The Aftab, May 30, 2002) According to statistics available with the government, the militants asked the private sector (including hawkers and porters) to stop work on 1,356 days between January 1990 and May 15, 2003.
Agriculture, which is the mainstay of the economy, did not actually decline, but its growth could not match that of the rest of India. The state’s agriculture ranked # 9 in 1991, but dropped to # 14 in 2001.
As soon as militancy started, industry vanished. In 1991, J&K was India’s second most attractive state for investment. (This factoid published in India Today, came as a surprise even to me.) Thanks to militancy, by 2001 its appeal to investors had dropped to # 12. This was the biggest decline for any state in India.
Then why does Kashmir’s economy still look quite good?
Generous government of India funding ensured that militancy did not push Kashmir’s economy back. However, militancy did retard Kashmir’s economic growth. The 1990s were a decade when India’s economy grew at around six per cent a year. Kashmir did not share this post-1992 boom. For the first time after its accession to India, Kashmir’s economy grew at a rate that, at 4.3 per cent a year, was lower than that of India as a whole.
Still, the point is that in the 1990s, far from contracting, the economy of the state actually grew. The state’s per capita income in 1996-97 was 13th among Indian states. It had thus fallen from the # 9 position that it had occupied in 1991, but was still infinitely better than the close-to-the-bottom position that it had in 1947. By 2001, it had bounced back a bit: to the 11th rank.
The one thing that contracted in the ‘90s, and dramatically so, was poverty. By the end of the decade the state had the lowest poverty ratio in all of India: 3.5 per cent. By way of comparison, this ratio is 26.1 per cent for India as a whole and 7.6 per cent in neighbouring, high-performing Himachal Pradesh. An ample infusion of funds from the rest of India helped.
In 1991, the government of India decided that 90 per cent of its aid to the state would be a grant and only 10 per cent a loan. This was a reversal of the position that had obtained since 1969, when 70 per cent was a loan and 30 per cent a grant. In 2001, Jammu & Kashmir received the fourth highest per capita economic assistance from the Government of India: Rs6,000 crore ($1.27 billion), or Rs6,000 for every man, woman and child every year. (This much is official. My own estimate is that in 1990 the state was # 8 in terms of per capita “plan” assistance. It wasn’t always so. In 1969, there were just three “special category” states. J&K was one of the three. However, by 1990, the list had swelled enormously. Some of the other states were given the 90:10 ratio. J&K was no longer in the top three. The decision of 1991 took the state back to the privileged position that it had occupied in 1969.)
“So, where does all this Government of India money go?” my socialite friends often ask. Into the pockets of a few corrupt officials? The answer is, “No,” despite all the visible indicators of corruption. The bulk of this money goes into the salaries of 3.5 lakh (0.35 million) government servants. Almost every 22nd person in the Valley is a civil servant or an employee of the public sector. And then there is electricity. Between a quarter and a fifth of what the centre gives the State goes into “subsidizing” the power consumed by the people.
In 2003, India and Pakistan made a fresh bid for peace. Stratford suggested that “although Pakistan’s attempts to improve relations with its neighbours (sic), especially India, (are) motivated by security concerns, economics is the primary driver behind its actions.” It added, “... any progress in smoothing relations with India would significantly improve Pakistan’s attractiveness to foreign investors and its chances of growing its economy internally”.
Whatever be the reason, let us hope that this time around the attempts at Indo-Pakistan reconciliation result in lasting peace for
the people of Kashmir and South Asia.
Excerpted with permission from
Jammu, Kashmir, Ladakh: Travel, Trekking, Culture, History, Wildlife, Almost Everything — Kashmir
By Parvez Dewan
Manas Publications, New Delhi. Email:
manaspublications@vsnl.com
Available in Pakistan with
Mr Books, Islamabad
Tel: 051-2278843-5 and
Paramount Books, Karachi
Tel: 021-4310030
ISBN 81-7049-179-7
723pp. Indian Rs1,495
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