REGIONAL polls to elect a local government will not resolve Kashmir’s decades-old conflict, a key resistance leader has said.

Ahead of the final phase of elections in the Indian-controlled region, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq — who has spent most of the last five years under house detention — said polls are being held as political voices, contesting India’s sovereignty over the region, remain silenced.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s far-right Hindu nationalist government stripped Kashmir of its semi-autonomous constitutional status in 2019.

The multi-stage election, the last phase being held today, will allow Kashmir to have its own truncated government and a regional legislature with limited powers. 

The detained leader, Mr Mirwaiz, said the election — touted by Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party-led government as a “festival of democracy” — cannot be an alternative to resolving the dispute.

“These elections cannot be the means to address the larger Kashmir issue,” said Mr Mirwaiz, an influential Muslim cleric and custodian of the six-century-old grand mosque in the region’s main Srinagar city, the urban heartland of anti-India sentiment.

It is the first such vote in a decade and since 2019, when New Delhi downgraded and divided the former state into two centrally governed union territories — Ladakh and Jammu-Kashmir — both ruled directly by New Delhi through unelected bureaucrats.

Locals see the vote as an opportunity to elect their own representatives and register their protest against the 2019 changes they fear could alter the region’s demographics, particularly through Hindu migration to what was India’s only Muslim-majority state.

Mr Mirwaiz said: “We have been forcibly silenced, but silence is not agreement.”