Biggest Kashmir party opposed to India’s stripping of region’s autonomy wins most seats in election

SRINAGAR, India (AP) — Kashmir’s biggest political party on Tuesday won most seats in the local election for a largely powerless local government in Indian-controlled Kashmir, official data showed, in a vote seen as a referendum against the 2019 move by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government that stripped the disputed region of its special status.

National Conference, or NC, won 41 seats and was leading in one constituency, mainly from the Kashmir Valley, the heartland of the anti-India rebellion, the data showed. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party secured 29 seats, all from the Hindu-dominated areas of Jammu.

India’s main opposition Congress party, which fought the election in alliance with the NC, succeeded in six constituencies.

“People have supported us more than our expectations. Now our efforts will be to prove that we are worth these votes,” Omar Abdullah, the NC leader and the region’s former chief minister, told reporters in the main city of Srinagar.

His father and president of the party, Farooq Abdullah, said that the mandate was to run the region without “police raj (rule)” and try freeing people from jails. “Media will be free,” he said.

Hundreds of the NC workers gathered outside counting centers and at the homes of the winning candidates to celebrate the party’s victory.

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It was the first such vote in a decade and the first since Modi’s Hindu nationalist government scrapped the Muslim-majority region’s long-held