Ishaq Chowdhary pulled the top off a wooden crate to show oranges fringed with powdery white mould. It was a freezing morning at the fruit market in Srinagar, capital of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, and market workers, huddling traditional fire-pots beneath their gowns, are sipping tea and starting to unload the day’s deliveries. The previous afternoon, five trucks rumbled into the market carrying oranges, pomegranates, bananas and grapes from Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
When the first consignment of Pakistani goods rolled across the Aman Setu bridge, or ‘bridge of peace’, 100 days earlier, they were welcomed by cheering crowds. It wasn’t quite the fall of the Berlin Wall, but after 60 years, a people severed by partition was taking a step closer together. For Chowdhary that excitement had long since ebbed. ‘It’s C-grade goods,’ he said, pointing at the oranges. ‘The best products are being sold at Lahore and Islamabad. The image of Pakistan has been tarnished by this trade.’
That’s the least of the disappointment: the bridge can only support the weight of pick-up trucks, not proper lorries; only 21 types of goods are permitted; there is no mechanism for cross-border payments, so it has to be a barter system; and, most irritating for Chowdhary, it is impossible for traders in Indian-controlled Kashmir to phone anyone in Pakistan — the lines have been blocked for 60 years. So it’s difficult to complain when your consignment of oranges comes in half-rotten.
I met Chowdhary three months after the trade started. Then the entire weekly trade was still worth less than £15,000 a week. It was supposed to be much bigger. Professor Nissar Ali, an economist at Kashmir University, said he had originally hoped it would hit the equivalent of $3 billion a year by 2010. Farooq Ahmed, Kashmir’s director of industries, says he was close to solving the logistical problems between the two sides back in November. ‘Things were moving on a very fast track,’ he said. ‘The payment part of it and the telecommunications part of it: we had worked out the details.’ Then came the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, which killed 164 people. ‘Suddenly after the bombings, there has been no progress.’
In the week of the attacks, a fruit delivery from Pakistan was turned back at the border. Then trade dwindled to just one or two pick-up trucks a week. When I met Ahmed, it had briefly returned to pre-Mumbai levels. But according to Dr Mubeen Shah, president of the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) it has since dwindled to almost nothing. ‘It has not stopped,’ he said in mid-March. ‘Last week was the only time when there was no truck going, because of Eid Milad-un-Nabi, the prophet’s birthday. Otherwise it is going on, but it’s very limited. At this point in time, it’s more of a symbolic thing. It’s not going to make a very big difference to the economy.’
Symbolism means a lot to Kashmiris. Ali Mohammed Nath, a fruit trader at the market, was particularly touched by consignments of ‘Peshawari chappals’— thick, pointed-toed leather slippers from Pakistan’s North-West frontier. ‘My ancestors used to wear these,’ he said. ‘It was narrated in the tales.’
For Chowdhary, the significance is closer to home. He gestured up at a photo of his grandfather on the wall of his cramped warehouse. ‘He used to operate one vegetable wholesale store at Lahore, one at Srinagar, one at Rawalpindi, one at Baramulla, and even one at Amritsar,’ he says, describing a trade route that dipped in and out of what are now Pakistan and India.
When India and Pakistan split in 1947, his grandfather was left running the shop at Rawalpindi in Pakistan, and only managed to return to India in the mid-1960s. Chowdhary’s uncle and other relatives are still there. For the architects of the border opening, this is the prize — not just starting trade with Pakistan-administered Kashmir, but restarting trade through it to Pakistan’s big cities, and even, through the port of Karachi, to the world beyond. ‘This could be a very big trade,’ said Chowdhary. ‘This is the natural market route for Kashmir. For centuries, it was the gateway for the rest of the world.’
Chowdhary is not the only merchant seeking to rebuild an ancient family empire. In 2004, Dr Mubeen Shah returned to Kashmir, after 13 years of economic exile in Singapore, primarily to restart the family’s chain of factories. With a greying moustache and the drawl of someone born to privilege, he looked a little out of place in the KCCI’s dusty rooms off Srinagar’s high street, Residency Road. Until the uprising against Indian rule broke out in 1989, his family business was one of Kashmir’s largest, with a cement factory, two marble factories and a silk factory. His Kohimaran Carpets still has 20 outlets in Dubai, five in Malaysia. Midway through our interview, he picks up the phone and barks instructions about a carpet sale at Bluewater shopping centre in Kent.
The KCCI was the best lobbying forum for pushing the reforms he needed to get those factories up and running. Besides, he felt a duty to help get his country back on its feet. But three years at the helm have left him frustrated. ‘To be fair, we’ve had a lot of interaction with the central government. We have given numerous briefings to the Prime Minister himself. But the implementation is still not there. There have been reforms, but it’s a very, very small number. If you ask for 100, they will give you one.’
For 20 years, Kashmir’s industry has stag-nated. Between 1990 and 1998, Kashmir lost 1,382 days — about five years — to strikes and curfews. Tourism, once a mainstay of the economy, dried up. Srinagar’s Dal Lake had 3,500 ornate houseboats by the time the British left in 1947. There are now 1,200. The military occupied hundreds of hotels, schools, hospitals and factories as barracks for the 250,000 troops they moved in.
The situation is now calmer; 2008 saw only 89 civilian deaths by violence, the lowest number since 1989. But few businessmen or banks are confident enough to risk investments. ‘They’re all closed,’ Shah said of the factories he came back to re-open five years ago. He still wants to start them up again, but the conditions aren’t right. ‘It’s a big risk,’ he said. ‘Who will want to build anything if they think it’s going to be requisitioned by the military? How can you expect the business to work in such an environment?’
The problem of Kashmir’s seized-up industry goes right down to street level. On a stone embankment of the Jhelum river, close to Shah’s office, I met six young men whiling away their afternoon. It turned out that they had graduated from Kashmir University only the day before. But they didn’t see many prospects. ‘Right now there’s nothing for us but unemployment,’ said one, Amin. ‘There are PhD holders here who are doing jobs for 3,000 or 5,000 rupees [about £70] a month in call centres. It was improving. But after the strikes, they shut it all down.’
Amin’s solution was to get out. His parents have scraped together the money to put him through a business degree at Brunel University in west London. He has little urge to return. ‘When I’ve spent so much money pursuing my graduation in London, why would I pursue my career in Kashmir?’ he said.
Since the Mumbai attacks there has been some good news. In January, Kashmir swore in 38-year-old Omar Abdullah as chief minister, after a huge voter turn-out. Omar is a pragmat ic, pro-India politician well-positioned to fight for Kashmir’s interests. He has close links to Rahul Gandhi, who is seen as a potential future Indian prime minister. Both are young, both are the heirs to independence-era political dynasties, and both have European mothers. Rahul is the daughter of Italian-born Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi. Omar was born to a British mother called Molly, in Essex.
The other cause for hope in Srinagar are the recent statements on Kashmir from US President Barack Obama and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband. And there have been slight improvements on the economic side. In the courtyard of the Hotel Tramboo, by the former tourist draw of Dal Lake, for example, there is a tangled heap of military razor wire. The military left its barracks here in October. The owners say the hotel has been wrecked. But they were lucky to get the property back before the Mumbai bombings brought the process to a halt again.
Sadly, the kind of foreign tourists who once sought tranquillity in the hotels and houseboats of Dal Lake are still by and large scared off by the grim-sounding government travel warnings. More adventurous souls are coming to ski and climb in Kashmir’s mountains. In January, the Gulmarg ski resort actually ran out of ski-hire gear.
Basic infrastructure which was long lacking is also gradually arriving. Kashmiris did not have access to mobile phones at all — the Indian government saw mobiles as a security risk — until the mobile phone company Aircel set up in 2004. Tata Indicom gave Kashmiris a choice of two providers last year, and Vodafone is busy building a network. It’s a similar story with the banks. For decades, Kashmiris relied on the state-owned Jammu & Kashmir Bank. In the last few years, however, ICICI, HDFC, and Yes Bank, three of India’s private sector banks, have all set up shop.
In February, Srinagar airport saw its first international flights come in, with a weekly service to Dubai. But full economic revival will take a lot more — and Kashmiris are used to unpleasant surprises. Take Mubeen Shah. For three years he’s been in discussions with Delhi officials as head of Kashmir’s business community. Then in October, Delhi suddenly impounded his passport.
‘They sent me a letter saying that you have worked against the integrity and sovereignty of India,’ he said disbelievingly. The withdrawal was apparently punishment for Shah’s backing of the separatist Jammu-Kashmir Co-ordination Committee during the protests that rocked the state in October. The political situation also appears to be taking a turn for the worse. Dialogue between India and Pakistan is still frozen, while Pakistan’s military begins to make threatening noises against President Asif Ali Zardari.
Obama and Miliband may have put their feet in it diplomatically by talking up a solution to Kashmir. It’s gone down well in Srinagar, but after a hostile reception in Delhi, both the UK and US have played down the importance of Kashmir, with the US removing it from special envoy Richard Holbrooke’s agenda.
None of this seems to have left many people in Srinagar surprised. After 60 years of division and struggle, Kashmiris have seen enough false dawns to know that, all too often, what seem like historic openings end up as little more than Ishaq Chowdhary’s rotten oranges.
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