Kashmir's apple traders stuck between govt, militants

The government clampdown and threatening posters by militants have caught fruit traders in Kashmir in a bind as peak harvesting season for apples has already begun.

Around 35 lakh people in Kashmir are directly or indirectly associated with the fruit industry and they fear prevailing unrest will incur huge losses to them. While early ripening varieties of pear and apple are harvested from mid-August, peak season has just begun and will continue till October end. Even some varieties are harvested till late November.

Posters bearing letterheads of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) have reportedly appeared in Sopore, Shopian and other fruit mandis in Kashmir over the past two weeks threatening traders and other business establishments with ‘dire consequences’ if they opened their shops or kept up the apple trade.

In early September, a family of an apple trader in Sopore was targeted by unidentified militants in which four people, including a 30-month-old baby girl, were injured. According to the police, the attack was meant to scare traders away from the fruit market.

The fruit mandi in apple town, Sopore, the second largest apple market in Asia, is usually full of apple boxes and trucks this time of the year but reports said that these days it is locked and deserted. The market has 1,100 traders and usually it processes around 4,00,000 boxes of apple every day.

The traders are sandwiched between threats by the militants and diktats by police and local administration, who have asked them to keep the mandi open during the day. They also allege that the security forces did not allow fruit trucks to move during the night.

“Three of our traders were shot at in Sopore by militants earlier this month, which has led to fear psychosis. Militant posters are appearing in the area asking us to close down the market. The government asks us to either shut down or open the market during day time as well,” a fruit trader from Sopore told DH.

“How can we do business under these circumstances? We are sandwiched between the two guns,” he rued.

Another trader said that apple did not become a target even during the 1990s, when militancy was at its peak. “We sent apples outside the state during the 2008, 2010 and 2016 summer unrests. That time neither government, nor militants interfered. It seems apple trade has become a casualty of the government’s attempts to portray normalcy this time,” he said.

The Parimpora fruit market in Srinagar also lays locked and empty and so are the fruit markets in Shopian, Anantnag and Pulwama in south Kashmir. The growers are still weighing their options. As of now, they are skeptical of the government’s market intervention price scheme.