Column Can the valley afford ‘azadi’?

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: unless the latter are plugged firmly to the global economy. There are also forces that ameliorate the inland-coast growth differences in large countries. China, for instance, has witnessed the greatest peace-time migration in history with almost a quarter of its population moving coastward from the West. To a lesser extent, this is happening in India as well. Finally, a ‘trickle-down’ of coastal growth also eventually does percolate to the hard-to-reach parts of a country. For a small landlocked nation-state, neither globalisation nor internal markets nor positive externalities work, and there is no escape from the morass.

What shape does this economic isolation take? The United Nations has identified a few ecological ‘hotspots’ that are at maximum risk from ecological and disease-related mortality and economic losses. Not coincidentally, they are located in Sub-Saharan Africa, Mongolia and the Hindu Kush area. Economic stagnation does not just mean a few rupees less—these are areas with significantly higher vulnerability to epidemics and child mortality.

An economic disaster begets fundamentalism and terrorism, particularly if you are in the wrong neighbourhood and when self-styled jihadis have taken up your cause for decades. Religion has been central in the long-drawn secessionist movement and if the ‘moth-eaten’ nation-state of Kashmir (for sure sans Jammu and Ladakh) comes into being, it will have little but religious fanaticism to live on. The impact of this fundamentalism on its only industry, tourism, should be easy to guess.

Economic rationality rarely informs national ambitions, but it is time for the thinking Kashmiris to take a deep breath and contemplate what they should really raise their voice for—to partake as equal partners in what promises to be a historic growth phenomenon second only to China’s, or for a doomed state ravaged by poverty, violence, disease and despair. To what end are their pipers leading them on? Is the modern history of neighbouring Afghanistan really what Kashmir is dying to relive?

It is time Kashmir realises what is for its own good—not secession, but, on the contrary, greater integration with the rest of India. If Article 370 is a roadblock to that, Kashmiris should demand, rather than resist, its rethink. It is time the Kashmiri people, New Delhi and the international community finally remove the shackles of history from what is anyway a prisoner of geography. Its special history and accession notwithstanding, it is time Kashmir becomes a normal Indian state.