Voters line up to cast ballots during the first phase of assembly elections in Pulwama, south of Srinagar, on Sept. 18 as Indian security personnel stand guard. © AFP/Jiji
NEW DELHI — Northern India’s Jammu and Kashmir region kicked off its first legislative assembly polls in about a decade on Wednesday, with local demands for restoration of the region’s special status being one of the major issues. Voting will continue in October and results are due on Oct. 8.
Jammu and Kashmir is one of eight union territories in the country, and a key region given long hostility between India and neighboring Pakistan over it. Elections come five years after the area’s special status was scrapped by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party stripped the semi-autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019, following which the party’s popularity appears to have slid in the region. The former special status had permitted only residents of the area to buy property and secure local jobs. It was the only Muslim-majority state in the country, where some 40,000 people had been killed in a separatist insurgency since the early 1990s.
As a result of the 2019 autonomy repeal, the former state of Jammu and Kashmir was split into two federally governed territories — Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. The majority of people in Kashmir are Muslim, while in Jammu most are Hindu. Most residents in Ladakh are Muslim or Buddhist.
These elections will lead to the formation of a local government that is expected to press the federal government to promote regional development and security. Some local parties are calling for restoration of statehood if voted into power.
Elections were last held in 2014, in what was then the state of Jammu and Kashmir. But the government that was formed collapsed in 2018, and there has been no legislative assembly in the region since then.
A total of 90 seats are up for grabs in the assembly elections, with 8.7 million registered voters — about half of whom are women. The second and third phases of voting are set for Sept. 25 and Oct. 1, with ballots counted on Oct. 8.
In the six-week-long parliamentary polls across the country that ended in early June, Jammu and Kashmir saw a historic voter turnout of 58.5% — its highest in 35 years.
Anurag Thakur, a former union minister and BJP star campaigner, second from left, and the party’s national general secretary, Ram Madhav, second from right, wave at a campaign rally for the Jammu and Kashmir assembly elections. © APThe Kashmir region has been a source of tension between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan since their partition in 1947, when British rule ended. Each neighbor rules part of the Himalayan territory but claims it in full. New Delhi blames Islamabad for fueling insurgency in the Indian-controlled part, which Pakistan denies, claiming that it has merely extended diplomatic, political and moral support to Kashmiris.
Addressing a huge public rally in the northern region’s Doda area on Saturday in a bid to strengthen his party’s position, Modi vowed to build together with its people a “secure and prosperous” Jammu and Kashmir. “This is Modi’s guarantee,” he said amid loud applause and chants of his name.
“This assembly election is going to decide the fate of Jammu and Kashmir,” he said, adding that after India’s independence from British rule, the former state became “a target of foreign powers” — an indirect reference to Pakistan.
“The political parties you trusted did not care for your children, but only promoted their own children,” he said in a veiled attack on the opposition Indian National Congress party and local People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and National Conference parties which ruled the former state in the past. Modi is also expected to visit the regional capital of Srinagar on Thursday after the first phase of polling to address another rally.
In early March, Modi made his first appearance in Kashmir since scrapping its special status, offering new economic development programs just ahead of the general elections. “I’m working hard to win your hearts,” he told a large gathering in Srinagar. His party contested the general election only in Jammu while skipping the Kashmir part of the region completely for the first time in nearly three decades.
The assembly elections are happening less than a year after India’s Supreme Court upheld the government’s decision to repeal the region’s special status. In December last year, the top court also ordered that assembly polls be held by Sept. 30.
“In the valley, I think, they are still weak,” V.S. Chandrasekar, a New Delhi-based political observer and former executive editor of the Press Trust of India news agency, said of the BJP’s prospects in Kashmir, adding that the party is unlikely to get a stronger ally there.
Supporters of India’s opposition Congress party at an election rally south of Srinagar in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Sept. 4. © APThe BJP was part of the former state’s coalition government with the local PDP after the last assembly elections in 2014 threw up a hung result, but pulled its support of the PDP in 2018 amid increasing violence in the region. The BJP has decided to field its candidates only in 19 of 47 constituencies in the Kashmir Valley in the current assembly elections.
“For the PDP it is like once bitten twice shy,” Chandrasekar said on the PDP not joining hands with the BJP — and now even more so after the revocation of the region’s special status and statehood — issues which anti-BJP parties made a focal point during campaigning in the general election.
On the other hand, the country’s main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, has tied up with another popular local party, National Conference, for the assembly elections. Jamaat-e-Islami, a banned religious-political outfit, has also fielded some of its members as independent candidates, re-entering the electoral process after about 40 years.
Separately, popular local leader Sheikh Abdul Rashid, also known as “Engineer Rashid,” was granted interim bail last week to campaign for these assembly polls which his Awami Ittehad Party (AIP) is also contesting. He was arrested in 2019 on terror funding charges and won the general election in one of the Kashmir constituencies earlier this year. Some of his rivals call AIP “a BJP proxy,” a claim he denies. He resigned from his job as a construction engineer to contest the 2008 assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir.
“Initially, the National Conference-Congress alliance appeared to have had an edge in the Kashmir Valley, but with Engineer Rashid entering the fray in a very aggressive manner in the north [of Kashmir] and Jamaat-e-Islami cadres contesting in the south, which is their stronghold, the game is now open,” Ajay Kaul, a longtime Kashmir watcher hailing from the region and editor-in-chief of the United News of India, told Nikkei Asia. “In Jammu, however, there will be a direct contest between the BJP and a Congress-led opposition alliance.”
“In the case of a fragmented mandate, the BJP will make all efforts to form their government in the region as earlier they had also [tied up] with the PDP despite the two parties having very divergent views ideologically,” he added.
source : asia.nikkei