SRINAGAR, India, Sept 30, (AP): Ahead of the final phase of a local election in Indian-controlled Kashmir, a key resistance leader says the regional polls to choose a local government will not resolve the decades-old conflict that is at the heart of a dispute between New Delhi and Pakistan. Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, who has spent most of the last five years under house detention, said the polls are being held as political voices contesting India’s sovereignty over the region remain silenced after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government stripped the region of its long-held semi-autonomy in 2019.

The detained leader said in a phone interview with The Associated Press that the election, touted by the Modi government as a " festival of democracy ” in the region, 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 region’s main Srinagar city, the urban heartland of anti-India sentiment.

The multistage election, the last phase of which is being held Tuesday, will allow Kashmir to have its own truncated government and a regional legislature with limited powers. It is the first such vote in a decade and the first since 2019, when New Delhi downgraded and divided the former state into two centrally governed union territories - Ladakh and Jammu-Kashmir - both ruled directly by New Delhi through unelected bureaucrats.

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. India’s clampdown following the 2019 move "has silenced people” in the region who "feel dispossessed and disempowered,” Mirwaiz said. "You may not see active turmoil like before 2019 but there is a strong, latent public resistance to all this,” he said. "We have been forcibly silenced, but silence is not agreement.”