Written in the wake of the imposition of a New Delhi–sponsored puppet regime in the early 1950s, prominent Kashmiri poet Mirza Arif Beg's “Ten Quatrains” laments a lost society that has compromised its morality, political ethics, and sense of justice for quick riches and worldly power. The unrepresentative and corrupt administration put in place after the unceremonious dismissal of Kashmir's prime minister, Sheikh Abdullah, for resisting Kashmir's complete integration with India, wreaked havoc on Kashmiri society, creating new social groups who repeated the sins of the past, monopolizing power and excluding the majority from networks of patronage. As India attempted to bring Kashmir closer to itself, its imposition of puppet regimes transformed Kashmir's political economy, producing social fissures between and within classes and religious communities.

Prior to Kashmir's accession to India the political economy was designed to create social and economic inequalities, with the rich reaping all benefits at the cost of the poor. The landed class created and nurtured by the Dogra state in rural Kashmir exercised domination. Meanwhile, in the urban centers the elites, both Hindu and Muslim, lived a life of comfortable existence and the state subjected ordinary artisans, shawl weavers, and laborers to heavy taxation. As Kashmiri nationalists led the movement for rights in the mid-twentieth century, they articulated a vision for economic freedom that promised to eradicate the hierarchical relations of exploitation and expropriation in Kashmiri society. Their economic vision of ending the dominance of landed elites who exercised complete hegemony over the peasantry mobilized agrarian Kashmir to imagine emancipation as equity and justice in economic dealings. However, these imaginings remained unfulfilled in the aftermath of partition. Even though Kashmiri nationalists implemented their promise of Naya Kashmir by abolishing absentee landlordism and distributing land to its tillers, the reforms failed to bridge the disparity of wealth between social classes. The economic status of certain sections of agrarian Kashmir improved, yet a new class of rural elites retained land privileges, ensuring that the now well-to-do peasantry remained closely aligned with existing power structures.