Indian Government Claims Development Will Reduce Militancy In J&K scroll.in

Home Minister Amit Shah claimed on August 6, that the removal of Article 370 – which gave special privileges to Jammu and Kashmir, including the right to reject certain laws passed by the Indian parliament – would propel economic growth, in turn reducing militancy and insurgency. However, there is no direct and clear relation between the fall of insurgency and the decline of poverty in Kashmir, data show – insurgency has risen and fallen, depending on geopolitical factors, even as poverty has steadily declined.

Historically, a decline in poverty from the mid-1970s until the mid-2000s – which saw the state witnessing lower poverty rates than most other Indian states, as well as better health and nutrition outcomes – did not result in a decline in terrorism. The state’s special privileges were in place from October 1949 until August 2019.

Between 1993-’94 and 2011-’12, the percentage of people living below the poverty line in the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir reduced from 26.3% to 8.1%, according to the Tendulkar Poverty Estimates. Yet militancy strengthened or abated, based largely on extraneous geopolitical factors, as data from the South Asia Terrorism Portal show and experts state.