Two days after introducing new regulation, India axes rule on IIOJ&K voting rights

SRINAGAR: The Indian government scrapped on Thursday a rule granting voting rights to new residents of Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJ&K) after widespread anger in political parties, who labelled it a bid to change the demographics of the country’s only Muslim-majority region.

In 2019, Narendra Modi-led central government stripped the IIOJ&K of its remaining measure of autonomy, reorganising Jammu and Kashmir state into two federally-controlled territories and changing the constitution to let non-Kashmiris vote and own land there.

The rule scrapped on Thursday had been introduced just two days earlier in one district of 20 in the region. It had allowed Indians who have lived in Kashmir for a year or more to register as voters, replacing a rule that limited the franchise only to those who had lived there in 1947 – the year that India gained independence – or their descendants.

The measure of October 11 “is withdrawn and to be treated as void,” an electoral officer in the Jammu region, Avny Lavasa, told a British wire service, without giving a reason for the withdrawal. IIOJ&K last voted in 2019 in national elections, a few months before it was stripped of its autonomy.

In August, the government said it expected to add 2.5 million voters to Kashmir’s rolls, which would swell the electorate by more than a third from 7.6 million now. Kashmiris fear that any rule changes which add new voters would allow Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to alter the region’s make-up, stamping out a decades-long independence movement that India accuses Pakistan of stoking.

Islamabad denies that accusation, saying it only provides diplomatic and moral support for Kashmiris seeking self-determination. Pakistan accuses India of human rights violations in the IIOJ&K.

“The BJP’s attempts to create religious and regional divisions between Jammu and Kashmir must be thwarted,” former chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, who is president of the J&K Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.