After India last held state elections in Jammu and Kashmir in 2002, the Kashmir Valley witnessed a period of relative peace only to see it shattered when plans to give land to Hindu pilgrims triggered the biggest protests since the Kashmir separatist revolt erupted in 1989.
The latest elections - which produced a turnout of more than 60 percent despite a boycott call by separatists and ushered in a new state government led by Omar Abdullah - have provided a second chance to change the mood in the volatile Kashmir Valley. But do India and Pakistan, and the Kashmiris themselves, have the ability to turn this second chance into a real opportunity for peace?
Despite the outrage over the Mumbai attacks, blamed by India on Pakistan-based militants, there are some promising signs. The elections were remarkable for the fact that armed separatists based in Pakistani-held Kashmir made no attempt to disrupt the campaign, as they did during the previous polls in 2002. If Indian assertions are correct that the Pakistani security establishment controls the level of armed separatist activity in Kashmir, then the absence of violence would not have been possible without the active cooperation of Pakistan - a factor acknowledged by The Hindu in an editorial.
Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has spoken repeatedly of the need to make peace with India, including over Kashmir (as discussed here, here, here and here) and despite widespread scepticism in India that his views are shared by the powerful Pakistan Army, Pakistan does seem to have delivered in keeping the militants at bay during the elections.
Meanwhile trade between the Indian and Pakistan-held parts of the divided former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir has continued even through the heights of the post-Mumbai tensions.
And perhaps one of the more promising signs is that Indian newspaper columnists have been careful on the whole to avoid any hint of triumphalism in proclaiming the high turnout an endorsement of Indian rule, suggesting that New Delhi may have learned the lessons of last year’s land protests - that peace in Kashmir cannot be taken for granted.
Instead columnists stress the long road ahead in bringing any kind of normality to the state. (The political parties which fought in the elections made a point of trying to delink Kashmir’s status from the polls, running their campaigns instead on issues of governance.)
In the Hindustan Times, columnist Prem Shankar Jha analyses the voting patterns across the state and concludes that behind the overall high turnout there were still strong pockets of resistance, particularly in the Kashmiri capital Srinagar. ”The voting pattern shows that ‘separatism’ has not died, but become more localised,” he writes. ”While the government has been congratulating itself in the jump in the turnout in Srinagar from barely 5 per cent in 2002 to 20 per cent this year, it has chosen to forget that in a truly free and contested election, such as that of 1983, the turnout in the city was over 80 per cent,” he adds. ”The abstention is significant because except in China nearly every successful rebellion has begun in the cities and has been led by precisely the kind of people who remain alienated today.”
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