Pakistan-administered Kashmir opens polls in violence-wracked vote

First of three rounds of voting held after weeks of protests during which dozens of people were killed.

Pakistan-administered Kashmir has gone to the polls under heavy security for the first round of local legislative elections that have been racked by violence.

Voting began on Monday morning in the first of three rounds of the elections. Dozens of people have been killed in the run-up to the voting as protests demanding electoral reform transformed into deadly clashes.

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Last week, the electoral commission announced that voting would be split into three phases due to concerns over stretched security personnel.

Witnesses said turnout in Mirpur district, the first area to vote, appeared low in the summer heat. Some candidates complained that internet restrictions imposed during the protests and ensuing clashes had hampered their campaigns.

About 3.8 million residents in the Pakistan-administered portion of the disputed Himalayan region are eligible to vote in an election seen as a test of security after weeks of clashes between police and protesters.

Since early June, nearly 40 people have been killed. Authorities have imposed an unofficial state of emergency by suspending mobile and internet services across most of the territory.

“The internet shutdown has created serious difficulties … for political candidates and the electoral process itself. Reaching voters has become much harder,” independent candidate Malik Alauddin told the AFP news agency in the lead-up to the vote.

Alauddin said he adopted a campaign style favoured by pre-internet generations, focusing on gatherings in remote villages and going door to door to potential voters’ homes.

“This is a vast mountainous constituency. If the internet were available, a single social media post could reach thousands of voters, but now we have to travel to every small village,” he said.

The Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), the movement behind the protests, was banned by the local government under “anti-terrorism laws” in June.

Its demands, once centred on subsidised flour and cheaper electricity, have expanded to 38 points, chief among them the abolition of 12 assembly seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees.

Its leadership has since been arrested, gone underground or has continued organising from sit-in camps in Rawalakot, the administrative headquarters of Poonch division, the epicentre of the protests.

JAAC supporters have called on residents to boycott the vote and said the seats are used by major Pakistani political parties to tip the composition of the local parliament in their favour with those who mostly reside outside the region.