MONITORING (SW) – Voters queued outside polling stations in India’s Jammu and Kashmir on Wednesday to vote in the first provincial election being held in a decade in the Himalayan region that has grappled with years of militant violence.
The nine million registered voters are choosing members for the region’s 90-seat legislature in the three-phase election. Votes will be counted on Oct. 8 and results expected the same day.
For its residents, the chance to choose their own government seems to have brought a new air of optimism amid the never-ending violence.
Jammu and Kashmir is hold its first regional assembly elections in a decade. The last such ballot was held in 2014 when Indian PM Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the regional Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) formed a coalition government.
However, the coalition collapsed in 2018 when the BJP withdrew its support and New Delhi took direct control of the region troubled by separatist violence.
Now, the upcoming ballot offers a chance for the people of Kashmir to elect a new government after years of political uncertainty. It is also the first regional election since the region was stripped of its special status and divided into two union territories Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.
Regional parties like theJammu and Kashmir National Conference (NC) and thePDP, along with bigger national partiessuch as theBJPand theIndian National Congress (INC), are all contesting these elections.
But there are also many separatist running as independents, marking a significant shift from their previous stance of boycotting the polls altogether.
