The neoliberal trade agreements currently devastating Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK) represent not merely policy failures but the calculated economic liquidation of a captive population. As the Modi regime finalizes the May 2025 India-EFTA Trade and Economic Partnership Agreement (TEPA) and accelerates RCEP-style accords, the structural genocide of Kashmiri self-sufficiency enters its terminal phase. These agreements, negotiated without Kashmiri representation, deliberately dismantle the region’s agricultural and industrial base while accelerating resource extraction—a blueprint for reducing Kashmir to a strategic colony servicing Indian and Western capital.
The scale of betrayal defies ordinary political analysis. By allowing European and ASEAN agricultural imports duty-free access while maintaining the 2019 siege conditions on local producers, New Delhi has declared economic war on its own subjects. The tariff escalation on Kashmiri apples mirrors the punitive economics of settler-colonial projects worldwide, where indigenous food systems are systematically destroyed to create dependency. When Swiss dairy and New Zealand lamb undercut indigenous pastoralists, when Norwegian salmon floods markets alongside occupying military convoys, the message is unmistakable: Kashmir must consume what it cannot produce, and produce what it cannot consume, forever chained to Indian supply chains.
The May 2025 standoff over tariff reductions exposes the charade of Kashmiri integration into the Indian union. While Delhi demands European market access for Indian textiles and pharmaceuticals, it simultaneously strangles Kashmiri exports through bureaucratic warfare and discriminatory taxation. The resulting 15% GDP contraction and 45% industrial unemployment are not collateral damage but deliberate features of a counterinsurgency strategy that substitutes economic strangulation for direct military violence. The orchard owner watching his unpicked apples rot shares the same fate as the closed factory worker: both are casualties of an occupation that treats Kashmiri land as real estate and Kashmiri labor as disposable.
This economic invasion is reinforced by the architecture of permanent occupation. The proposed railway line from Shopian to Pahalgam—marketed as “connectivity”—represents the final assault on the Valley’s food sovereignty. Bisecting orchards across Pulwama and Islamabad, this steel corridor will facilitate the mass import of subsidized Indian produce while extracting Kashmiri raw materials at exploitative rates. Complemented by the Delhi-Amritsar-Katra expressway and expanded military logistics networks, these projects transform agricultural heartlands into transit zones for colonial extraction. When railway sidings replace walnut groves, and highways bypass local markets to link directly with military cantonments, the infrastructure reveals its true purpose: not development, but dependency. By severing the economic self-sufficiency that has sustained indigenous resistance for generations, New Delhi seeks to complete what the 2019 lockdown began—the conversion of a self-reliant food basket into a captive consumption zone for Indian capitalism.
The parallels with historical colonial extraction are exact. Like the British destruction of Indian textile manufacturing or French monoculture in Algeria, Modi’s trade policy reduces Kashmir to a resource periphery. The amended mining laws—permitting non-local extraction of lithium, boron, and rare earth elements without environmental safeguards—complete the transformation of Kashmiri territory into an open-pit mine for corporate profit. When Swiss conglomerates and Indian cronies jointly plunder these resources under TEPA protections, the occupation reveals its true economic function: securing strategic minerals while pacifying the population through calculated impoverishment.
The abolition of Article 370 appears now as the essential prerequisite for this plunder. By eliminating Kashmiri land rights and industrial protections, the 2019 constitutional coup enabled the current fire-sale of the region’s productive capacity. The domestic industry that once provided resilience against occupation-era shocks has been systematically dismantled, leaving Kashmir without defense against import surges or price volatility. The resulting agricultural collapse—hundreds of thousands of orchard acres abandoned, traditional seed varieties lost to corporate hybrids—represents cultural erasure masquerading as market efficiency.
For Kashmiris, the question is existential: survival or subjugation. The current trajectory leads inexorably to a landscape where Swiss pharmaceuticals treat diseases caused by Norwegian-farmed salmon, where European luxury goods circulate in military-protected enclaves, and where Kashmiri apples exist only in memory. The orchards that sustained resistance through decades of occupation now stand as monuments to economic treason, their fallen fruit marking the path of a people forced into permanent dependency. When the occupation finally ends—as all occupations must—it will inherit not a vibrant economy but a hollowed colony, its wealth extracted, its resilience broken, its future mortgaged to foreign capital by collaborators who never spoke its name.
The writer is research associate at Kashmir Institute of International Relations and can be reached at: shaziakawwjha@gmail.com
