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.
Even within a large country, the inland would lag behind the coast. However, membership of a large nation-state has its advantages. Large countries typically benefit from the scope for their internal markets to develop and industrialise faster than small states 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.
The author teaches finance at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad