DeansMusings

 I decided to write this after seeing a flood of articles, videos and social media discussion on Operation Sindhoor. A lot of it either focussed on the wrong subject – possible Indian aircraft losses, or does not put the operation in context, or speculates on why we agreed to a ceasefire – with the underlying assumption that Pakistan, or at least its air force, could have been finished off if the conflict had continued. Operation Sindhoor has to be evaluated in terms of its context, what its objectives were, the extent to which they were achieved and what our alternatives were at each stage of the conflict.   Background : In 1991, at the time India started economic reform and Pakistan chose an Islamist path, Pakistan’s GDP was 27% of India’s. At the time of the Kargil war in 1999, it was 20.7% of India. In 2025, Pakistan’s economy is projected to be just 9% of India’s. At current rates of growth, in 2031, Pakistan’s GDP will be 7% of India’s. In other words, India will sta...

I wrote an article 5 years ago, in Swarajya, when article 370 was revoked. https://rpdeans.blogspot.com/2023/07/kashmir-way-forward-after-370.html In that I suggested that developing tourism had the potential to transform the state, by generating hundreds of thousands of jobs. This is what happened in Tibet when mass tourism from Mainland China followed the development of high speed rail, which increased tourism 80 times, to over 40 million a year (compared with 2.7 million visiting the Kashmir valley).       The barriers to this were the completion of long delayed infrastructure projects (such as the rail project linking Srinagar to Jammu and northern India) and the level of militancy. 5 years after the revocation of article 370 is enough time to see how things progressed. Militancy:      Avg. 2014 - 18 Avg.   Aug ‘19 - Jul 24      Jun-Jul 24 Civilians Killed / year 132 ...

  This article, part of a series with Kriti Upadhyaya, first appeared in Swarajya in Aug 2019,  after article 370 was abolished. Post covid, I see a sense of urgency in implementing some of these recommendations. Now that the dust has settled on the decision to make Articles 370 and 35-A redundant, the focus is starting to shift on the kind of development that can take place, e specially since Jammu & Kashmir’s transformation is now set to occur under central rule. A lot of the speculation surrounding the way forward is ill-informed as it ignores critical limitations of the economy of J&K, namely its lack of natural resources, low population, distance from markets  etc . These are formidable barriers to quickly improving any the economy even if there is no militancy. Another error is thinking that the development has till now been state-led. In fact, the central government has been allocating 10 per cent of its funds, for a state with 1 per cent of India’s po...