On the morning of December 16, Nisar Ahmad had left home in the biting cold. By 8am, he was at the polling station in Naidkhai village in N...
On the morning of December 16, Nisar Ahmad had left home in the biting cold. By 8am, he was at the polling station in Naidkhai village in North Kashmir’s Bandipora district. He meant to vote.
At 1pm, Ahmad had still not cast his vote. “The line is just not ending,” he said as he waited for his turn in a queue stretching nearly 200 metres from the polling booth. “We know polling is scheduled to end at 2pm but the officials assured us that everyone will be given a chance to cast their ballot. We will wait till dark to cast our vote.”
Ahmad was voting in elections to set up district development councils, the newly created third tier of local government. Held in eight phases concluding on December 19, they were the first direct elections in Jammu and Kashmir since August 5, 2019, when the former state lost special status and was split into two Union Territories.
Since the summer of 2016, when the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani had triggered anti-government protests, voter turnouts in the Kashmir Valley have been pitiful. In the violence-scarred Lok Sabha bye-elections of 2017, it was a little more than 7%. In the...
