Modi campaigns in held Kashmir assembly polls after soldiers killed

NEW DELHI:Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi says “terrorism is on its last legs” in Indian-administered Kashmir while campaigning in the disputed territory, a day after two soldiers were killed in a gunfight with suspected rebels.

Indian-administered Kashmir has seen a rise in fighting between rebels and security forces before the region’s first local assembly polls in a decade. Voting begins next week. The Himalayan region in India has been without an elected local government since 2019 when Modi’s Hindu nationalist government cancelled the region’s semiautonomy.

“The changes in the region in the last decade are nothing short of a dream,” Modi told thousands of supporters at a rally on Saturday in Doda, a town in the Hindu-majority southern area of Jammu.

“The stones that were picked up earlier to attack the police and the army are now being used to construct a new Jammu and Kashmir. This is a new era of progress. Terrorism is on its last leg here,” he said, referring to the region’s official name in India.Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) say the government’s changes to the territory’s governance have brought a new era of peace and rapid economic growth.

Many Kashmiris are resentful of the restrictions on civil liberties that followed, and the BJP is fielding candidates only for a minority of seats concentrated in Hindu-majority areas. Modi pledged at Saturday’s rally that his party would “build a secure and prosperous” Indian-administered Kashmir “that is free of terrorism and a haven for tourists”.