Local elections can’t resolve Kashmir’s larger issue: Mirwaiz
Srinagar: Senior All Parties Hurriyat Conference leader, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq has said that a local government installed through manipulated elections will not resolve the decades-old Kashmir issue that is at the heart of a dispute between Pakistan and India.
According to Kashmir Media Service, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, who spent most of the last five years under house detention in Srinagar, occupied Jammu and Kashmir, said the elections are being held as political voices contesting India’s occupation over the territory remain silenced after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government stripped occupied Jammu and Kashmir of its special status in 2019.
The detained leader said in a phone interview with the US news agency, The Associated Press, that the election, touted by the Modi government as a “ festival of democracy ” in the territory, cannot be an alternative to resolving the dispute.
“These elections cannot be the means to address the larger Kashmir issue,” said Mirwaiz, who is also an influential Muslim cleric and custodian of the six-century-old grand mosque in the territory’s main Srinagar city, the urban heartland of anti-India sentiment.
As per the US news agency, AP, authorities have said the election will bring democracy to the region after more than three decades of strife, but many locals see the vote as an opportunity not only to elect their own representatives but also to register their protest against the 2019 changes they fear could dilute the region’s demographics.
