September 18 (EUROPA PRESS) –
Some 2.3 million citizens of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir are called to vote on Wednesday in the first regional elections in ten years since the country’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, revoked its autonomy in 2019. In these elections, 24 representatives to the state Legislative Assembly will be elected from among 219 candidates, 90 of them independents.
The first phase of the three-stage voting will take place today, with 123,000 people aged between 18 and 19, 28,300 people with disabilities and 15,700 people over 85 eligible to vote, the Indian newspaper ‘Hindustan Times’ reported.
The other two voting phases will take place on September 25 and October 1, while three days later, on October 4, the results will be announced.
The elections are seen as crucial for the political future of the state, which has not had an elected government since Modi’s BJP broke its alliance with the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in 2018.
Modi’s order to revoke the autonomy of the state, which belongs to a disputed region between India and Pakistan, led to the division of the state into two federal territories directly dependent on the New Delhi government: Indian Kashmir proper – made up of Jammu, the Hindu-majority area, and Kashmir, the Muslim-majority area – and Ladakh, a Buddhist enclave in a mountainous area bordering China.
This was seen by critics as a direct attack on the Muslim minority in a new act of supremacy by the ultra-nationalist Hindu prime minister.
The region, which has been disputed over by India and Pakistan since they gained independence from Britain, has been the target of two wars between the two countries and is marked by the actions of separatist Islamist militants in a conflict that has claimed the lives of more than 45,000 people since the mid-1980s. Modi’s government defended its decision by arguing that changing Kashmir’s status would bring economic prosperity to the region and end the insurgency.
However, the prime minister has already hinted at a change of heart following the poor results of the last legislative elections that ended in June, after which he was forced for the first time since coming to power a decade ago to govern in a coalition to stay in office and which undermined his symbolic status as the country’s self-proclaimed national leader as a bastion of the Hindu world.
The episode that ultimately decided the election to go ahead was an order issued by the country’s Supreme Court in December last year, which ordered the Indian Election Commission to hold the elections in Jammu and Kashmir no later than September 30 this year.
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