“We need handholding to resuscitate, not babus throwing the rulebook at us”

Tourism is the best baro­ meter of the situation in Kashmir: if it is troubled, the numbers plunge and if the Valley is at peace, they rise dramatically.

43,059 TOURIST NOS IN 2020, COMPARED TO THE AVG. OF 1.4 MN IN PREVIOUS YEARS

No one knows this better than hotelier Mushtaq Chaya, 70, chairman of the Mushtaq Group of Hotels, which has properties in J&K and Delhi. Chaya, in the hotel business since the mid­’80s, says the past five years have been disastrous for tourism as militant violence in 2016, political instability in 2018, the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019 and the rolling lockdowns of the Covid pan­ demic have all but broken the sector’s back in the Valley.