Kashmir votes as separatists urge election boycott

INDIA: State elections in India’s part of Kashmir opened Monday amid boycott calls by Muslim separatists who say the local polls will only entrench New Delhi’s hold on the troubled region.

The elections come after some of the worst protests against Indian rule in the country’s only Muslim-majority state and a crackdown on separatist leaders who oppose the polls.

“You can’t have free and fair elections in the presence of hundreds of thousands” of occupying forces, said Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a key separatist leader who has been under house arrest for three days.

Anti-India sentiment runs deep in Kashmir, where most people favor independence from India or a merger with Pakistan.

The region is divided between the two countries and both claim it in its entirety.

Voter turnout was slow early Monday with the temperatures low and skies overcast. Paramilitary soldiers and police officers outnumbered voters as polls opened in towns north of Srinagar. More than two dozen men who refused to vote gathered outside the polls in Baharpora, a village 20 miles (30 kilometers) north of Srinagar.

“We will not barter the martyrs’ blood for the vote,” said Bashir Ahmed, 22, a taxi driver. “Those who will vote are traitors.”

Elderly voter Habibullah Dar was one of fewer than 10 people who cast ballots early Monday in the village. All the voters appeared frail and aged.

“I have been voting all my life, and I have come to vote again,” Dar said.

More than 30 separatist leaders who called for a poll boycott have been detained in recent days under a law that allows police to hold people for up to two years without trial.

They were held for advocating “secession, breach of peace and intimidating people not to vote,” said B. Srinivas, a senior police officer. “We’ll not allow anybody to campaign against the elections,” he said.

The boycott was expected to be widely supported, particularly following the recent demonstrations, the largest pro-independence protests across Kashmir in two decades.

They were met with a tough crackdown by government forces, and at least 48 people were killed.

Srinagar, Monday, AP