The Election Is Not A Funeral

The seven per cent turnout in the Srinagar bypoll marks a new low for Kashmir’s pro-India parties.

- Naseer Ganai

“The youngsters here are angrier than they were in the 1990s,” Andrew Whitehead, who had been to Kashmir several times during that tumultuous decade as a BBC correspondent and went on to write A Mission in Kashmir, told locals who had come for his talk at a café on Residency Road near Srinagar’s Lal Chowk a few days ago. Recalling his conversation with an elderly woman with no separatist leanings, he said she remembered the 1990s as a time when the people were “angry and scared”, unlike now when most of them are “angry and fearless”.

Anger and fearlessness, indeed, were abundantly on display in the streets— and especially around the polling booths as Srinagar went to polls on April 9. With almost all separatist leaders either under house arrest or in jails, internet connections snapped, government forces in huge numbers manning the roads, streets, lanes and bylanes, the constituency that had in 2014 elected the People’s Democratic Party’s (PDP) Tariq Hameed Karra—the MP who resigned protesting against the crackdown on protests following the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen’s 21-year-old commander Burhan Wani last July— saw just 7.14 per cent (90,050) of the electorate (12,61,395) cast their votes for deciding who would represent them in the Lok Sabha—former CM Farooq Abdullah of the National Conference (NC), who had lost to Karra by a record 40,000 votes in 2014, his first poll defeat in a four-decade-long political career, or the ruling PDP’s Nazir Ahmad Khan.