In the winter of 2015, my husband and I were in Barcelona. Looking for a quick bite, we found a Lebanese takeaway and went in. The man making the pita bread sandwich looked like he could be a fellow countryman, so I smiled and said, “Indian hain?” “Nahin, Kashmiri,” he said, without looking up from arranging the falafel inside the bread.

I was momentarily puzzled. Thankfully, the whole geopolitical situation of Kashmir dawned on me and stopped me from asking naïve questions. Over the years, I have thought about this man’s grim response when I have met people in and from the state.

Pilgrims to Vaishno Devi know that all the horseman and porters there are Muslims. The sight of Ashfaq and Ali and Salman hauling devout Hindus up and down the mountain slopes to one of their holiest places is a triumph of economics over sentiment.

This harmonious relationship between service providers and clients has continued undisturbed for years. Religion and political ideology is irrelevant here; that is the luxury of those who have escaped to a developed nation or those attending seminars about the Kashmir situation in New Delhi’s Lodhi Road. The palanquin bearers and syces, cheerfully chatting in Dogri, have no hesitation in joining in the chorus of Jai Mata Di and even visit the shrine when time permits.

They are all low-income earners, sometimes doing the round trip of 22 km twice a day, hustling pilgrims for a couple of hundred bucks more. If you ask them why they don’t find some other livelihood, they’ll tell you there isn’t much else to do. Not many factories or offices to employ them as workers or office boys or dispatch clerks.

In June this year, we went as summer tourists to the Kashmir valley. The military is present at every street corner, alert jawans behind bunkers, watching each passing car. Despite that, everyone who visits Kashmir returns as enchanted as Jahangir once was, when he called it a paradise on earth.

We are mesmerised not only by the scenic vistas, but also by the beautiful people, their peachy complexion and infectious smiles. Not for nothing has Bollywood set many romantic stories in this land.

They hide their economic hardship well, these beautiful people. According to the Jammu and Kashmir Economic Survey, 2017, the per capita income of the state at Rs 77,918 is significantly lower than other north Indian states such as Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Uttarakhand, and Chhattisgarh.

It is also lower than the all-India average (Rs 1,03,219). A 2017 academic paper by an author from Anantnag points out that political instability, since the 1990s, has led to a huge diversion of resources from productive sectors to the maintenance of law and order.

The people of this state deserve better. Why should they not have, for example, a slice of the IT boom that so many states are benefitting from? Or the mobility advantage of Ola and Uber?

A couple of years ago, Amazon had stopped deliveries to Srinagar for a few months because they could not find courier services there. Lifestyle improvements that Indians elsewhere enjoy, has been denied to them for reasons which the average Kashmiri doesn’t care about.

Earlier this year, at a conference of Design Innovation Centres run by the central HRD ministry, I heard a lovely young Kashmiri woman from the Islamic University of Science and Technology, Awantipora, speak about not one, but three ventures she had started with aid from the ministry. All of them were extremely novel ideas rooted to the needs of the local people. Later at lunch, I told her that her choices defied the media-created stereotype of the stone-throwing, anti-India sloganeering Kashmiri student. She shrugged and said, “The average Kashmiri student is just bothered about assignments and classes and placements like students everywhere else. We just want to lead our lives normally.”

Whatever model was running till now did not give the people of Jammu and Kashmir the chance that other Indians have to better their lives. The new developments could potentially correct that and give them a shot at normalcy.

The cottage industry of anguished articles, books and exhibitions that has spawned from Kashmir’s suffering would of course lose its golden goose.

The author is an urban researcher and has written Urban Villager:

Life in an Indian Satellite Town