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India-administered Kashmir to hold first local elections in a decade
4:21 CAT | 18 Aug 2024
FILE - The decision to hold elections follows a December order by India's Supreme Court that rejected petitions challenging the revocation of Kashmir's special status and set a deadline of September 30 for holding provincial polls [File photo: Sharafat Ali/Reuters]
- Nearly nine million people are registered to vote in the polls from September 18 for the 90-member legislative assembly.
Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir will hold local elections for the first time in a decade, the head of the electoral commission said Friday, after polls were stalled following New Delhi’s imposition of direct rule in the disputed region.
Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir will hold local elections for the first time in a decade, the head of the electoral commission said Friday, after polls were stalled following New Delhi’s imposition of direct rule in the disputed region.
But critics say the 90-seat assembly will only have nominal powers over education and culture, and critical decisions will still rest in New Delhi’s hands.
Some hardline separatists, who demand independence for Kashmir or its merger with New Delhi’s arch-rival Pakistan, oppose elections because they see them as lending validity to Indian control.
They demand a referendum to decide the future of the Himalayan region of around 12 million people.
‘Ballot over bullet’
About 500,000 Indian troops are deployed in the region, battling a 35-year insurgency that has killed tens of thousands of civilians, soldiers and rebels since 1989.
“Sufficient forces will be there to deal with any eventuality,” Kumar said, especially following a surge this year of attacks in the southern Jammu region.
Elections for five seats in India’s national parliament were held in June, and Kumar praised them for passing peacefully, with people having chosen the “ballot over bullet and boycott”.
The vote saw a 58.6 percent turnout, according to the election commission, a 30-percentage-point jump from the last parliamentary vote in 2019 and the highest in 35 years.
Key separatist leaders, who previously called for an election boycott, are in jail.
The Peoples Democratic Party, a key Kashmiri party, dismissed Friday’s election announcement as “too little, too late”.
“A powerful state with special status, has been reduced to a municipality,” party spokesman Mohit Bhan wrote on social media platform X.
The last Jammu and Kashmir assembly election was in 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) entered into a ruling coalition with the Peoples Democratic Party.
The assembly was dissolved in 2018 after the BJP pulled out and the coalition collapsed.
In 2019, Modi’s government cancelled the partial autonomy of the region, turning it into a federally administered “union territory”.
That change stalled planned polls, and since then there have been no local-level lawmakers.
Instead, it has been run by a New Delhi-appointed governor.
The 2019 constitutional amendment imposing direct rule also divided the region.
One part, Jammu and Kashmir — made up of the southern Jammu region with sizeable Hindu populations, and the mainly Muslim Kashmir valley — will have its own assembly again after the coming elections.
Another section, the high-altitude Ladakh region, which runs along the contested border with China, is not included in the assembly, and is controlled directly by New Delhi.
Source: Al Jazeera
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