The auto-driver did not believe in mincing his words. "Why should I vote when my vote has no value," he said, as he drove me around the lanes of downtown Srinagar.
Abdul Rashid was 52 years old. The only time he had voted was as a young man in 1987. "It was a waste," he recalled. "Delhi overturned our vote and installed a puppet government." The tumult over that election marked the beginning of militancy in Kashmir.
While he had no interest in voting, Rashid had strong views on who should form the government in Delhi.
"People here want Modi sarkar in Delhi. Yahan siyasi tabdeeli ho jayegi. Kashmir's politics would change."
How precisely, I asked.
"The India parties National Conference and Congress have been claiming that no one can touch Article 370. They are fooling people. They are the ones who have hollowed out Article 370. Now if Modi comes, he would end it."
Article 370 of the Indian constitution gives autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir to frame its own laws. New Delhi's powers are limited to defence, foreign affairs, currency and communications. But Kashmiris say this situation hasn’t actually operated on the ground. Over the years, popularly elected governments in the state have been overthrown, resolutions passed in the state assembly have been ignored, Indian troops have flooded the valley, leading many in Kashmir to believe that Article 370 is nothing but the fig leaf for an armed occupation.
In India, parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party hold a diametrically opposite view. As the party's manifesto in 2009 said: "Article 370 poses a psychological barrier for the full integration of the people of Jammu & Kashmir with the national mainstream. The BJP remains committed to the abrogation of this Article."
If Modi scraps Article 370, what would be the response in Kashmir, I asked the auto driver.
"It would make people come out on the streets."
"How would that help?"
"Yahan haalat kharab ho jayenge."
"How is that good?"
"Koi na koi rasta nikal jayega. Kashmir masla hal ho jayega. The Kashmir question would be solved."
This was not a stray view. From shopkeepers to hoteliers, students to office-goers, many on the streets of Srinagar seem to believe that a BJP government would have more to deliver to Kashmir. Invoking Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP leader and former prime minister, hotelier Nasir Ahmed said, "Vajpayee opened the road for trade with Pakistan. Wo to bechaare Agra mein Kashmir masla hal kar lete. He would have settled the Kashmir question in Agra (in the summit with Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf) but vested interests came in the way."
"What people in Kashmir seem to have forgotten is that Vajpayee's government introduced POTA [the Prevention of Terrorism Act] which was used against them. It gave more incentives for extra-judicial killings. The number of encounters picked up those years," said Khurram Pervez, a lawyer who has been at the forefront of documenting human rights violations in the valley as the convenor of Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society.
These are not issues that the National Conference, the party in power in the state, is raising in its attacks on the BJP in this election. This is perhaps because it was a partner in the Vajpayee government. Instead, for weeks now, its leaders have been focusing on Narendra Modi's record in Gujarat, accusing the main opposition party in the state, the People's Democratic Party, of being in secret alliance with the BJP.
Such attacks, however, seem to have more resonance in Jammu region, where voters are polarised along religious lines, and not much in Srinagar, where politics revolves around the question of self-determination for Kashmir.
NC leader Farooq Abdullah's remarks about the Gujarat chief minister might have made headlines in India, but in Kashmir, the most significant reference to Narendra Modi came from Syed Shah Geelani, the leader of the separatist Tehreek-e-Hurriyat, part of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference.
Speaking with reporters, Geelani said Modi had sent two emissaries to meet him and other Kashmiri separatist leaders. He turned them away, he said, because of “Modi’s role as chief minister during the 2002 Gujarat communal riots”. But the other leaders, he claimed, were favourably inclined towards the BJP. This was seen as a reference to Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, another Hurriyat Conference leader, who immediately issued a denial, as did the BJP in New Delhi.
"Fundamentally, this is an issue of supremacy," said a senior journalist who did not wish to be identified. "Geelani wanted to show that he is open while others are not. This is classic internal bickering within the resistance camp. Many are upset that if Geelani sahab wanted to talk about Modi's emissaries, he could have talked about his meeting with them, why did he have to talk about the others. This could lead to fratricidal killings which have taken place in the past."
And then, in an evocative turn of phrase, he added, "Begaani shaadi mein abdullah diwaana. Modi has not yet been elected in India and he has already started rattling Kashmir."
Click here to read all the stories Supriya Sharma has filed about her 2,500-km rail journey from Guwahati to Jammu to listen to India's conversations about the elections – and life.
