Every November 15, governments and institutions reaffirm their commitment to fighting transnational organised crime. They speak of cartels, drug routes, and smuggling rings. Yet few mention Jammu and Kashmir, where organised crime does not hide in the shadows. It operates under official protection, cloaked as “national security.”
Between 1990 and 2024, civil groups documented more than 8,000 enforced disappearances. Thousands remain uninvestigated. Each unaccounted life adds to the normalisation of lawlessness, an environment where organised crime thrives.
The 2019 revocation of Article 370 marked a turning point. India’s move to revoke Kashmir’s limited autonomy was presented as a path to “integration” and “economic reform.” What followed instead was a quiet land rush. Indian and foreign investors with deep pockets and politically connected firms entered a fragile economy battered by lockdowns and communication blackouts. Thousands of hectares were reclassified for industrial and military use, often taken from farmers and community trusts with little to no compensation and a lack of transparency.
The Environmental Policy Group in Srinagar estimates illegal riverbed mining in north Kashmir alone generates more than ₹1,200 crore annually (around $144 million) through unregulated extraction from the Jhelum and its tributaries. The profits bypass local governance entirely, feeding a network of contractors and middlemen who operate with official cover. Development has become a convenient narrative for dispossession.
Kashmir’s economy increasingly mirrors that of other conflict zones. It runs on control, coercion, and extraction. When the 2020 Land Laws allowed non-residents to buy property in Jammu and Kashmir, it was framed as modernisation. In reality, it accelerated demographic and economic manipulation.
Private companies with ties to politicians and ex-military officers began acquiring large tracts. What might appear as an investment is, in essence, a structural occupation. Across the world, from the Congo to Afghanistan, resource control under armed supervision has followed the same pattern. Kashmir fits that template perfectly.
Illegal trade, too, operates under the same veil of silence. Between 2020 and 2024, police in Jammu and Kashmir seized narcotics worth ₹1,000 crore ($120 million). Yet none of the major networks behind these operations have been exposed. The arrests focus on small-time couriers, never on financiers or facilitators.
How do such networks function in one of the most heavily monitored territories on earth? Locals in border districts like Kupwara and Poonch speak of “known routes” that remain mysteriously active despite checkpoints and surveillance.
The arms trade also persists. Old weapons once confiscated in raids reappear in fresh cycles of violence. Each resurgence helps legitimise the argument for more troops, more funding, more control. A perpetual loop keeps both the conflict and the criminal economy alive.
Meanwhile, counterfeit currency and smuggled gold circulate through networks linking Delhi, Chandigarh, and Gulf intermediaries. These flows blur the line between local corruption and international laundering. Kashmir’s war economy has quietly gone global.
Social Cost
Every black market leaves a human toll. Drug addiction has surged among Kashmiri youth, with over 70,000 registered addicts as of 2024, most under 30. The same insecurity fuels human trafficking.
According to India’s National Crime Records Bureau, trafficking cases in Jammu and Kashmir rose by 35 percent between 2019 and 2024, a figure that likely underrepresents the reality. Families often avoid reporting such cases due to fear and stigma.
In villages scarred by conflict, women and children face the dual threats of violence and exploitation. Poverty, trauma, and displacement create fertile ground for criminal networks that feed off despair. This is the predictable outcome of a controlled economy that erodes accountability. The international community, for its part, rarely connects these dots. The United Nations and its agencies continue to classify Kashmir as a “dispute” or a “security issue.” Such vocabulary reduces systemic exploitation to an abstract conflict.
Under the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC), states must prevent and prosecute crimes like trafficking, corruption, and money laundering. But what happens when the state itself is part of the network? The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has conducted extensive studies on cartel economies in Latin America and the Balkans. Yet it has never examined South Asia’s conflict economies, particularly those under military rule.
The silence is political. To name Kashmir’s system as organised crime would require confronting a state, not just a syndicate. In Kashmir, legality itself has become a weapon. From land seizures to surveillance, every policy is framed as lawful. Yet the law serves as the tool of control. Journalists are jailed under counterterrorism statutes. Civil rights defenders are branded as threats. Each act of silencing protects an economy that runs on fear and opacity.
This crime represents organised governance. Power and profit merge until neither can be distinguished. What was once a counterinsurgency has morphed into a business model where every checkpoint, every permit, and every mining lease feeds into a system of extraction.
If the global community is serious about combating transnational organised crime, it must widen its lens. The framework must include state-enabled corruption, occupied economies, and digital authoritarianism.
Kashmir offers a case study in how organised crime evolves when the perpetrators hold legal authority. From the illicit mining on the Jhelum to the narcotics trade on the border, every chain leads back to protected circles.
The victims are not only the disappeared or the detained. The entire population is caught in an economy of control, where the rule of law has become the rule of power.
Organised crime in Kashmir no longer hides behind masks or under the table deals. It sits in offices, signs contracts, and issues press releases. The difference between the criminal and the official has blurred beyond recognition.
As the world observes another International Day against Transnational Organized Crime, it must confront this reality: when crime becomes policy, silence becomes complicity.
Until the world acknowledges the criminal economy operating under the guise of governance in Kashmir and elsewhere, the web will continue to grow, invisible, protected, and profitable.
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