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that aspect of the business entirely. Less than 30 percent of the space was used by big companies and more than 70 percent by local farmers.
    This has also meant that Mir’s other big poster—warning that no one should be seen eating an apple within the compound—is taken very seriously these days. “If somebody is seen eating an apple, and there are farmers around, they will immediately wonder, ‘Whose apple is that?’ And they raise the alarm. We are working to create an environment of full transparency, which has been difficult here.” Kashmir was ranked among the four most corrupt states in India in a 2008 Transparency International study; Mir says modern enterprise and systems are bringing sociological change.
    â€œFor instance, Kashmiris have always been called lazy, but in 2010, when the stone pelting was going on through the day, what we did was we just did all the work at night!” laughs Mir. “We told our employees that instead of working during the day, just work at night and that way our trucks could pass undisturbed.” 2 In a state that has lost five years of working days to strikes in the last 23 years, such innovation is critical. “Today in Kashmir, if there is a will, there is a highway of enterprise that is open,” says Mir, who tells his employees that they should never aim to work at Harshna for more than two years. “My standard introduction is—after two years, if you do not leave me and start your own business, then I have failed.”
    There are many signs that this time around, the peace wave might be enterprise driven. On the back of record tourist arrivals (1.1 million in 2011–2012), Congress Party general secretary Rahul Gandhi, a personal friend of state chief minister Omar Abdullah, made a gesture in October 2012 that was as much political as it was economic. He invited some of India’s biggest tycoons, including Ratan Tata, Kumaramangalam Birla, Deepak Parekh and Rahul Bajaj, to visit the valley with him, promising to bring India’s biggest business houses to the beleaguered region. Part of the idea was old—integrating the valley into the economic growth story of India—but as a top-ranking bureaucrat in the Kashmir government told me, the method was new.
    â€œWe have tried everything from interlocutors to prime ministerial missions. Now the thought is the delivery of hope cannot be just top-down. It has to be bottom-up too,” said the bureaucrat. “Sometimes economics can tell people that there is something to look forward to better than politics.”
    Khurram Mir was at a closed-door meeting with the business leaders. “Mr. Birla said for enterprise to grow, there has to be a degree of stability. But I liked what Mr. Tata said—that the true spirit of enterprise is to circumvent the situation and continue the work, and that ultimately brings peace,” he says.
    In 2011, Tata’s Taj chain of hotels opened their first property in the valley, with an 89-room hotel overlooking the Dal Lake and Asia’s largest tulip garden and boasting a 2,500-square-foot presidential suite. One of the earliest big hotel chains in the valley, The Lalit Group, announced in 2012 that their palace hotel in Srinagar had become the chain’s highest revenue generating property after years of losses since they took it over. In 2012 Srinagar’s first radio taxi service, called Snow Cabs, was launched, and Kashmir University started to offer its first MBA course.
    Numbers back Tata’s claim. According to the Home Ministry, terrorism-related murders in the valley in 2010–2011 amounted to 2.77 per 100,000 population, lower than the murder rate in Delhi (3.1) and Haryana (4.1). Essentially many more people are being murdered in the seemingly peaceful heart of India than in what is often described as “insurgency infested” Kashmir. So there is greater consensus than ever that Kashmir’s