The State Claims Control. The Market Disagrees
Prices do not rise in a vacuum. They rise when no one is watching, and in Kashmir's markets today, no one is watching with any sustained institutional seriousness
Across the Valley, the signals are neither new nor subtle. Meat, vegetables, and fuel-linked commodities fluctuate without warning. Household budgets absorb silent shocks that official statements do not acknowledge. No formal crisis has been declared. That is precisely the problem. The absence of a declared emergency does not mean the market is functioning under the rule of law. It means the erosion is gradual enough to escape political urgency, and slow erosions are the most dangerous kind. What is unfolding is not a seasonal price spike. It is the quiet collapse of regulatory credibility. Price lists exist. Enforcement does not. Monitoring teams appear episodically, not structurally. Penalties are announced with press release efficiency and pursued with bureaucratic indifference. The result is a hybrid economy with visible regulation on paper, invisible governance on the ground.
Traders have long understood this arithmetic. They adjust prices in anticipation of supply friction, transport cost pressure, or simply because the cost of non-compliance is lower than the benefit of arbitrary pricing. The administration is not failing to control prices. It has stopped trying in any meaningful, sustained way. What exists is optics management review meetings, advisories, and periodic enforcement drives timed for visibility rather than impact. Seasonal transitions, post-winter demand cycles, and supply chain friction are entirely predictable phenomena. Yet the regulatory response treats each surge as an unexpected development. That is not administrative incapacity. It is an administrative habit; the habit of reacting rather than governing. The public cost is measurable and compounding. Erosion of purchasing power, silent economic anxiety in working-class households, and the steady delegitimisation of state authority in the one domain of essential commodities, where credibility is most consequential. When the state cannot enforce a price list, it signals to every other regulatory domain that enforcement is negotiable. The solution is neither complex nor expensive. It requires a permanent, rotating enforcement presence with documented outcomes, not task forces deployed for a week and dissolved. It requires accountability chains that reach upward, not outward press releases.
Markets do not self-correct where governance is absent. They simply run on their own terms, at their own price.
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