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Kashmir’s Elite: Silent Architects of This Land’s Ruin

Kashmir has never suffered from a shortage of intelligence. It has suffered from a surplus of clever (read cunning) people who knew exactly what was wrong – and chose to do nothing about it.

For decades, the narrative has been carefully curated. Blame Delhi. Blame Pakistan (only when it becomes unavoidably important). Blame history. Blame conflict. Blame everyone except the one class that had the education, access, networks, and power to actually change things – the elite. The drawing-room patriots. The seminar circuit intellectuals. The file-pushing bureaucrats. The profit-first businessmen. The legacy politicians. The pimps of a common Kashmiri’s blood.

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The uncomfortable truth is this: Kashmir did not decay in spite of its elite. It decayed, in large part, because of them.

The Politics of Power, Not Purpose

Kashmir’s political elite mastered one craft to perfection – staying relevant. Not by building institutions, but by ensuring institutions never became strong enough to outgrow them.

Dynasties were nurtured, not leadership. Loyalty was rewarded, not competence. Governance became a performance – announcements, statements, optics – while the ground reality quietly rotted. It rotted so badly that the new rot began to appear as a new normal.

Long-term planning? Non-existent. Structural reform? Politically inconvenient. The result is visible today: a system so hollow that even minor challenges begin to look like crises.

The Bureaucracy That Perfected Inaction

If politics weakened the system, the bureaucracy ensured it never recovered. In fact, it became a willing accomplice in the crime.

An entire administrative culture evolved around one........

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