Column Can the valley afford ‘azadi’?

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

: The unfortunate turn of events in Jammu & Kashmir seems to have given a fresh lease of popular support to the separatist elements in the valley. Secession is a popular idea again, and a land dispute seems to have strengthened the cry, hopefully temporarily, for an independent nation-state of Kashmir. While this is still far from an imminent reality, Kashmiris would benefit from pausing to consider exactly what future some of them are clamouring for.

The primary force sketching an independent Kashmir’s destiny would be its exquisite and unalterable geography. Kashmir would be a small, landlocked, subtropical, primary producing nation with tourism as its only significant non-primary sector—breathtakingly beautiful but impossibly isolated. It turns out that this is exactly the recipe for economic disaster.

As a determinant of national poverty, geography has withstood the scrutiny of time. Writing in 1776, Adam Smith had observed that the interiors of Africa and Asia have been the most difficult places to develop economically. That has not changed in the years since. Two and a quarter centuries after Smith, Jeffrey Sachs and his co-authors are confirming the same effects. Location still matters, in fact rules. Even in today’s ‘flat’ and wired world, some places continue to be less flat than others.

A cursory look at the world distribution of wealth reveals a few interesting facts. Poverty is, generally speaking, a tropical phenomenon—the temperate lands as a group are considerably wealthier. It is also, once again relatively speaking, a continental, rather than coastal feature. Small countries tend to seriously lag their larger counterparts in economic growth. Finally, particularly in this age of globalisation, landlocked countries are the most disadvantaged. Globalisation does not add to their impoverishment, it just bypasses them completely.

Geography matters within countries as well—most of China’s growth stems from its coastal East—home to about a quarter of its population—while its Western regions, including those neighboring Kashmir, languish in poverty. Inter-state disparities in India reflect the same broad pattern. All of our ‘Bimaru’ states are landlocked entities. Within a state, the Singur land squabble involved displacing farmers from fertile multi-crop land while thousands of acres of barren land lay just a few hundred miles west.