INDIA: Islamic terrorists opposed to next week's polling in northern India's disputed Jammu and Kashmir state assembly have launched their anti-election crusade in the border regions around a chillingly effective slogan backed by brutal killings: Candidates will be beheaded and voters' homes will be destroyed.
Their intimidation campaign appears to be working. Voters in the state's worst militant-infested area adjoining Rajouri and Poonch districts, bordering Pakistan in the Jammu region, over 500 miles north of New Delhi, are convinced that, unlike the politicians, the insurgents will deliver on their promise despite the overwhelming presence of security forces.
"In the current climate of abject fear, voter turn-out is expected to be low," said Syed Yasin Shah of Manjakot police station near Rajouri. Few would dare defy the insurgent's election boycott call knowing full well their capacity to strike, added Shah whose police district lies directly along the infiltration route preferred by militants across the Pir Panjal mountains from Pakistan as they gather to bolster the state's 13-year-old Muslim insurgency that has claimed over 35,000 lives.
In the run-up to the first of four rounds of polling beginning on September 16th and ending on October 8th, terrorists from the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT or Army of the Pure) group beheaded eight people in the remote mountainous hamlet of Dodasan Bala near Rajouri late last month, including three women and the locally revered school teacher, Babar Hussian.
The following morning, terrified villagers discovered the mutilated bodies lying in a bloody heap alongside a note accusing their victims of helping the security forces "sanitise" the area ahead of elections by leading them to arms dumps and providing information on their hideouts in the thickly forested mountains. The note also warned all those who participated in the elections with a similar fate.
Last week, LeT cadres shot dead two children of an official handling election-related tasks, aged 10 and 12 years, while his eight-year-old daughter survived with multiple gunshot wounds. A few days earlier, terrorists from the same outfit killed three relatives of a local constable deployed on an election security detail.
District officials said over 30 such election-related killings of Muslims had taken place over the past four weeks in the Jammu region and villagers had been told by militants not to apply for voter identification cards or face the consequences.
Insurgents, holed up in "liberated zones" that even the army does not patrol, frequently arrived in villages to carry out searches for these cards and beat up those found to possess one. Passengers on a bus from Surankote to Poonch were stopped by terrorists last week and lectured about the "dire consequences" of voting, police said.
"Few are likely to exercise their franchise", a local officer said. Poonch and Rajouri go to the polls in the first round.
"The brutality of these executions are aimed at intimidating voters in a region that earlier has had a high turn-out in previous elections," Poonch's senior superintendent of police, Kamal Saini, declared. He said the police were battling hard to instill confidence among voters having killed 520 Pakistan-backed terrorists last year, almost a third of all terrorists eliminated in the state. Intelligence officers estimate that 700 Pakistan-backed militants are operating in Rajouri and Poonch, bent on disrupting voting in seven of 87 state assembly constituencies.
The two nuclear rivals came close to war, averted under US pressure, earlier this year after they mobilised over one million soldiers along their common frontier after the attack on India's parliament and a garrison in Jammu which Delhi blamed on Pakistan. Under Washington's influence, Pakistan President Pervaiz Musharraf tacitly endorsed Indian allegations of "sponsoring" Kashmiri militancy, but pledged to end it.