[Asif Ahmad, a political science student from Pulwama, said the Indian government was “desperate” to show that it could conduct peaceful elections in Kashmir. He said that residents were “being coerced in the name of democracy,” and that many wanted to send a message by staying home.]
By Sameer Yasir
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An
Indian soldier outside a polling station in the Pulwama district of Kashmir
on
Monday. Credit Mukhtar Khan/Associated Press
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NEW
DELHI — Violence disrupted
the Indian election in the disputed Kashmir region on Monday, as separatist
militants attacked two polling stations and the police responded with what
residents called excessive force.
Militants in the Pulwama district hurled
grenades at the polling stations, the police said, and protesters threw stones
at security forces, hoping to shut down the voting, which is being conducted
over five weeks throughout India. The police fired pellet guns in response,
injuring at least a dozen people, according to residents.
The mountainous Kashmir region, whose people
are mostly Muslim, has a history of contentious voting. It has been caught up
in a longstanding, often brutal territorial dispute between Hindu-majority
India, which controls much of the region, and Muslim-majority Pakistan.
Last week, the Indian police arrested or
detained hundreds of people in southern Kashmir after separatist leaders called
for the polls to be boycotted. Syed Ali Geelani, the chairman of a separatist
organization, said in a statement that the elections were a “vast military
exercise” and that the Indian state had overseen “ruthless killings” in
Kashmir.
For the first time, the Election Commission
of India divided voting in south Kashmir into three phases this year, hoping to
blunt expected protests and violence.
Leading up to the voting, the Indian
government also deployed thousands of troops in the region. By the end of the
third phase of voting on Monday, only 3 percent of Kashmiris had cast ballots
in south Kashmir. In other parts of India, the turnout has been several times
that figure.
Asif Ahmad, a political science student from
Pulwama, said the Indian government was “desperate” to show that it could
conduct peaceful elections in Kashmir. He said that residents were “being
coerced in the name of democracy,” and that many wanted to send a message by
staying home.
“We don’t want these sham elections,” he
said. “We want India to deliver on its promise of a plebiscite and resolve the
Kashmir dispute once and for all.” Pakistani officials have long called for a
referendum that would allow Kashmiri residents to choose between Pakistan and
India.
In recent years, the nature of the conflict
has changed. In the late 1980s, Kashmiri guerrilla fighters regularly crossed
the border into Pakistan to receive arms training. Now, the fight is more
localized. Homegrown militancy has spread, and India has responded by killing
hundreds of young Kashmiri fighters.
Violence flared again in February, when a
Kashmiri militant rammed a vehicle filled with explosives into a convoy of
Indian paramilitary forces traveling on a busy highway, killing at least 40
soldiers in the worst attack in the region in three decades.
That attack set off a tense military standoff
between India and Pakistan, where a banned militant group, Jaish-e-Muhammad,
claimed responsibility. Since then, a crackdown on separatist leaders in
Kashmir has intensified, worsening residents’ antipathy toward Indian security
forces, who have been accused of grave human rights violations by the United
Nations.
Last week, when a protester, Shahid Riyaz
Thoker, 13, was apprehended during a midnight raid at his house in the village
of Muran, his father said, security forces “dragged him by his hair.”
“This is the price of living under an
occupation,” the father, Reyaz Ahmad Thoke, said.
Kai Schultz contributed reporting.
