Plan and Prepare for Statehood
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah expressed disappointment over the Supreme Court not hearing the petition for restoration of statehood till October 2025. He is hopeful that the Court will set a timeframe for its restoration. It is easy to sympathize but difficult to empathize with his position. The disappointment may be genuine, but the hope, for sure, is misplaced.
Prime Minister Modi does not believe in judicial intervention as a solution to a political issue. In July 2017 when there was news of Union government going to use the Supreme Court for nullifying Article 35 A, Modi told NSA, Ajit Doval, that the issue should “be resolved through political executive owning up the move through parliamentary route rather than through the back door of judicial pronouncement”. “Public acceptability of such decisions”, the Prime Minister elaborated, “is higher when the political leadership undertakes the ownership and responsibility of such decision”. (Page 282 & 204 in “370: Undoing the Unjust”: A New Future for J&K” by Bluekraft Digital Foundation, Penguin Enterprise). Evidently then, the route to statehood doesn’t pass through the backdoor of the judiciary.
Which raises the all-important question of what the strategy of the valley-centric parties for restoration of statehood and the special status is. As of now, there doesn’t seem to be any. Especially for National Conference, the ruling party. The opposition parties, without exception, have a simple strategy; beat the ruling party with the stick of statehood. Cutting the cacophony of the demand for restoration of statehood, it is imperative to strategically plan and operationally prepare for it. Otherwise, it will be another empty slogan which, in the lexicon of the 1990s, will degenerate into Hum Kya Chahtay, Statehood.
What will happen if statehood is granted tomorrow? Manna is not going to fall from the Heavens. It will be more of the same, give or take a few minor differentiators. The administrative structure will remain the same; as bureaucratic at it was or is. The J&K cadre may be carved back from the AGMUT, but the officers will be the same. The finance secretary will report more obediently to a finance minister, but will that change the fiscal policy of the state? The Commissioner Secretary Industries may listen more diligently to the Industries and Commerce Minister, but will that change the industrial policy of the state? At best it will get tweaked with an additional incentive here or a higher subsidy there for effect and emphasis. But for sure, the mug shots on the brochures will change, even as the message will remain pretty much the same! To put it in extreme terms, the actors will change, the actions will remain the same.
With the fury and frenzy of natural disasters in and around J&K, be it in the Chenab Valley or the Pir Panchal, or Himachal, and Uttarakhand, J&K’s developmental strategy must be radically changed, the governance priorities completely reordered, and the alternate model speedily implemented. The wrath of nature is not going to be less intense just because J&K is designated as a state. Nor will the natural calamities create more damage because J&K is a UT. What matters is not the form of government but how prepared the government is to deal with the eventuality. Preparedness, not in terms of disaster relief only but in terms of pre-empting, preventing, and limiting a natural calamity and crisis.
If there is one thing that this elected government owes to the people of Kashmir, it is a paradigm shift in its developmental policy and strategy. Environment and Sustainability cannot be an afterthought or an obligatory paragraph as it is in the manifesto of the National Conference. Nor can it be paid homage in the title as in the Vision Document of the UT Government, 2023. The vision is of “Sustainable Integrated Development through technology for prosperous and quality life at par with national/global standards” is too abstruse to make any policy sense. Even so, the ten chapters of the Vision Documents include everything except sustainability. It must be at the centre and core of the new development strategy.
The policy makers are still promising to make Kashmir a “manufacturing hub” and an industrial zone. The number of tourists is still regularly bandied about as the bellwether of prosperity and development. Investments from outside are considered as the final endorsements of the prevalent regime. The objectives and parameters of success remain the same, be it an elected or an unelected government. The routes may be a little different. Elected government will look for ways of giving protection to the local business class to the extent possible and permissible. The unelected government will make them compete in the process of opening the larger market to them. But broadly the point is that irrespective of who is running the show, the nature of economic regime remains the same.
The urgent need is to formulate an alternative development strategy. The Kashmir economy is an export-oriented import intensive artisanal and agrarian economy with adverse terms of trade resulting in outflow of capital. The net result is that expenditure in Kashmir is generating more income outside the state than within; a classic case of the “missing multiplier”.
Post 2007 global financial crisis, the world over, against the backdrop of deindustrialization and the rise of the service economy, small artisan businesses have been promoted as a liberatory alternative to large-scale enterprise and mass production. But not so for Kashmir though it is most ideally suited for it.
The flawed strategy to bring in manufacturing capital into Kashmir, set up industrial estates, build physical assets is not in line neither with where the world is headed nor aligned with the structure of the local economy. The drivers of today’s economic growth and business prosperity are not physical assets but knowledge products. Value and wealth are being created on digital platforms, not on construction sites.
In a world where environment and sustainability rule the roost, where the carbon credit market is offering better returns than the stock markets, Kashmir should stay away from being a manufacturing or an industrial hub for corporate conglomerates. In a future-centric economy it makes no sense to put a premium on industrial units by offering fiscal and quantitative incentive.
The Rs 2,80,000 crore economy of J&K needs a new focus. While the size of “government economy” is about Rs 95,000 crore spread over infra, utilities, and services, the “private sector” economy is nearly one and half times this size. The “private sector” economy has dominant artisanal and horticultural segments of about Rs 75,000 crore. The formal enterprises generate about Rs 70,000 crore.
The creative economy is the second largest contributor to income in J&K with income share of 25-30 percent and employment share of 12 to 18 per cent, way ahead of the global creative economy which contributes income of 0.5 per cent to 7.3 per cent of GDP and employment of 0.5% to 12.5 per cent of the workforce.
Given the composition of the state domestic product, predominantly sustainable enterprises such as the artisanal crafts sector, and horticultural J&K has the potential to be the Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) capital of India. This can be done by incentivising farm’s carbon balance, biodiversity, water quality, derivative risk mitigating derivate instruments like futures and options, so that environmental gains are not only maximised but also monetised.
Entrepreneurs in Kashmir should be helped to explore these new age opportunities instead of incentivising wonton construction of hotels to support overtourism resulting in environmental degradation, strained infrastructure, reduced quality of life for residents, and a diminished visitor experience. The environmental costs are not high, these are prohibitive. J&K can legitimately aspire to be and be the first sustainable sub-economy of the country with a premium on quality of not just growth, but life as well.
The author is Contributing Editor Greater Kashmir
