Jammu: It is with a certain degree of wistfulness that traders in Jammu’s Raghunath Bazaar, the city’s central shopping district, recall the market’s past and its lost raunaq.
The sense of dejection they share is remarkably at odds with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s triumphant narrative that the revocation of Article 370 has ushered in transformative changes in the region.
Yet, it isn’t hard to deduce why the BJP appears to sit pretty in Jammu’s urban pockets where voting is due on 1 October, in the last phase of the ongoing assembly elections in the Union Territory (UT) of Jammu and Kashmir.
“Kuch paane ke liye kuch khona padta hai (to gain something, one has to lose something),” Mohan Lal, a septuagenarian who is among the oldest traders in the market named after the Dogra dynasty-era Raghunath Temple, told ThePrint.
In August 2019, the Narendra Modi-led government, months into its second term, heralded a tectonic shift in the region by revoking the special status granted to Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Constitution of India, and downgrading it to a UT from a state.
Cut to 2024. Jammu betrays a sense of helplessness, with the euphoria generated by the abrogation of Article 370 having engrained itself.
Blow of scrapping of Darbar Move
The city’s influential business communities are reeling under the blow of the scrapping of the Darbar Move in 2021, which ended the 150-year-old tradition of shifting the civil secretariat to Jammu from Srinagar during the winters, between November and April.
Many of them feel that the presence of an elected government could have helped prevent such “unilateral actions” of the authorities.
The tradition was started in 1872 by Maharaja Ranbir Singh of the Dogra dynasty, which ruled the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir between 1846 and 1947, ostensibly with the objective of bridging the cultural and linguistic diversity of the region.
It was scrapped in June 2021 by the UT administration led by Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha, following an observation by the Jammu and Kashmir High Court that the exercise, which cost the exchequer Rs 200 crore annually, had no legal and constitutional basis.
Resentment is also brewing among local traders over, what they feel is, the New Industrial Policy of the UT giving “primacy to industrialists from other states” over the region’s existing businesses in the form of incentives and subsidies running into thousands of crores.
On top of that, the extension of the railway network to Katra, which is now connected to Delhi by two Vande Bharat Express trains, helps people headed to the Vaishno Devi shrine bypass Jammu, further crippling its trade-dependent economy.
“Fine, Article 370 is gone. I belong to a family that has traditionally followed the RSS. It’s a move in the national interest and we were the first ones to welcome it. But what have we got in return? The six winter months are when the markets of Jammu used to thrive. Bazaar mai raunaq hoti thi (markets used to be bustling). Look around, it’s all gone now,” Sanjay Gupta, who runs a shop selling woollens in the Upper Gummat Bazaar, also in the city’s central business district, told ThePrint.
According to estimates of the Chamber of Commerce & Industry Jammu, the Darbar Move would inject up to Rs 2,000 crore to the economy of Jammu by way of families of Kashmiri employees moving in annually, taking up houses on rent, indulging in shopping, among other means. In its manifestos, the National Conference, which is in an alliance with the Congress, and the Jammu and Kashmir Apni Party, seen as an unofficial BJP ally, have promised to reinstate the annual move.
“Jammu’s economy has no manufacturing base. It is also not dependent on tourism or horticulture like Kashmir. It has a trade economy. The Darbar Move used to bring thousands of families for purposes leading from coaching to shopping. The Kashmiri wedding season falls during summers.
The families of government employees based in Kashmir used to do a lot of wedding shopping from Jammu where they had a reason to be. Since there is no such apparent reason now, they fly off to Delhi or other places,” author Zafar Choudhary told ThePrint.
‘Situation will become worse’
A visit to the once bustling business hubs of Jammu offers compelling evidence that the slump is real. Rows of shops, selling a range of products from garments to dry fruits to spices, are waiting for customers in numbers large enough that can sustain the businesses in the long run.
A traders’ body office-bearer, who did not want to be named to avoid being branded a BJP baiter, said the situation will turn worse once the Jammu-Baramulla railway line gets operational.
“The extension of the line to Katra has led to a reduction of at least 10,000 visitors to Jammu daily. They would otherwise use Jammu as the transit point before heading to Vaishno Devi. In the process, their expenditure would come into Jammu’s economy. That has stopped. Once the railway line to Srinagar gets operational, tourists will bypass Jammu in even larger numbers unless places of attraction in Jammu are redeveloped,” the person told ThePrint.
In their speeches, BJP leaders—including Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah—refer to the establishment of an IIT and IIM in Jammu, along with an AIIMS located around 30 kilometres from the city, as the Centre’s achievements in developing the region.
“These projects have added prestige to Jammu, no doubt. But they are not job creators for locals. There are hardly any locals studying or teaching there,” the person quoted above added.
How local industries have been impacted
The projected investments under the New Industrial Policy, launched in January 2021 with a proposed outlay of Rs 28,400 crore, are also held up as the sign of changing times by the ruling establishment. But there are complaints even on that front.
Lalit Mahajan, chairman of the Jammu Federation of Industries, told ThePrint that local stakeholders, who were “not consulted with” when the policy was drafted, have been given a short shrift.
“The local industries, be it flour mills, food production units, or packaging units, provide direct employment to over 2 lakh people while a few lakh people more get jobs indirectly such as through the sector of transportation. But the new policy offers no sops for the expansion of existing industrial units. The local industries used to get a package of Rs 1,800 crore annually. Now it has been reduced to Rs 500 crore approximately,” he said.
Be that as it may, the BJP remains upbeat about its prospects.
What people in Jammu feel about BJP
Intently watching a television news debate on the controversy over the alleged presence of animal fat in laddus at the Tirupati temple, Gulshan Mahajan, a former BJP corporator in Jammu who runs a footwear store in Raghunath Bazaar, brushes aside the possibility of the BJP suffering a poll setback in Jammu.
“An economic slump here or there doesn’t count in the large scheme of things. There was a time when the Raghunath Temple, which is right down the street, used to come under terror attacks. Gone are those days of fear,” Mahajan said, downplaying the recent spate of terror attacks on Jammu division as an outcome of “terrorists fleeing from Kashmir taking shelter in the hills of Jammu”.
The Raghunath Temple, located in the heart of Jammu, had come under terror attacks twice in 2002, leading to the killings of civilians as well as security personnel.
Ashok Sachdeva, who runs a departmental store in the city’s Gandhi Nagar area, says he has no qualms in admitting that the BJP has been a “let down” in governance, development and tackling corruption in Jammu.
“I never voted for the BJP till 2014 when Modi arrived. Today he is here, tomorrow it will be Yogi (Adityanath). But Modi has set in motion a Hindu Navjagran (Renaissance). People take pride in calling themselves Hindus today. He made it possible and that is why my vote, and that of many others, will still go to the BJP,” Sachdeva said.
(Edited by Radifah Kabir)