Kashmir's 1st phase of election underway

SRINAGAR, India -- Hundreds of thousands of people in Indian-controlled Kashmir voted Saturday amid tight security and freezing weather in the first phase of local elections, the first since New Delhi revoked the disputed region's semiautonomous status.

Nearly 6 million people across the region's 20 districts are eligible to vote for 280 members of District Development Councils in a staggered eight-phase process that ends Dec. 19.

Authorities deployed thousands of additional soldiers in the highly militarized region to guard the vote. Government forces laid razor wire and erected steel barricades on roads around many of the 2,146 polling stations.

Election Commissioner K.K. Sharma appealed to residents to "participate in the biggest festival of democracy." Officials said voter turnout was about 52% out of the eligible 700,000 voters for Saturday's ballot.

As standard protocol for the coronavirus pandemic, authorities placed hand sanitizers, masks and thermal scanners at the polling stations.

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India says the polls are a vital grassroots exercise to boost development and address civic issues and will uproot regional corruption. Separatist leaders and armed rebel groups that challenge India's sovereignty over Kashmir have in the past called for a boycott of elections, calling them an illegitimate exercise under military occupation.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party has fiercely campaigned for the election in the Muslim-majority region in a bid to replace local Kashmiri pro-India parties that had formed an alliance.

The Kashmiri alliance has vigorously opposed Modi's government after it revoked the region's semiautonomous status in August 2019, annulled its separate constitution, split the area into two federal territories -- Ladakh and Jammu-Kashmir -- and removed inherited protections on land and jobs.

The Indian government imposed sweeping restrictions, arrested thousands of people including pro-India Kashmiri leaders, and enacted measures that triggered widespread anger and economic ruin.

The current voting is part of a three-tier process in which residents directly elect their village representatives, who then vote to form development councils for clusters of villages called Block Development Councils. Members for the larger, third and top-layer District Development Councils are also directly elected by the residents.

The elected members have no legislative powers and are responsible only for economic development and public welfare.

Officials are also simultaneously conducting the election for hundreds of vacant seats on village councils that went uncontested in 2018.

Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party has a very small base in the Kashmir valley, the heart of the decades-old anti-India insurgency, but has significant support in four Hindu-majority districts in the Jammu area.

The Kashmiri alliance has accused the government of interfering with their campaigning, a charge denied by the Election Commission.

The alliance also accused authorities of putting top leader Mehbooba Mufti, a former top-elected official and ally of Modi, under house arrest Friday. Police denied Mufti was restricted to her hoxqme.

Waheed Ur Rehman Parra, Mufti's colleague and a candidate in the election, was arrested by India's National Investigation Agency on Wednesday on charges of having links with Kashmir's main rebel group.

Some Kashmiris view the polls cynically as a move to create a new political elite loyal to the Modi government.

"This is an ideological vote," said Najeeb Khan, a voter in Srinagar, the region's main city. "People are considering it a referendum against the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party]."