The panchayat and municipal elections are scheduled from October 1. The panchayat and municipal elections are scheduled from October 1.

The Joint Resistance Leadership (JRL) — the alliance of separatist leadership in Kashmir — comprising Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Mohammad Yasin Malik Monday called for a boycott of the panchayat and municipal polls scheduled in Jammu and Kashmir from October 1.

Underscoring that the government of India wanted to “thrust and enforce panchayat and municipal elections upon us through additional deployment of lakhs of forces under the pretext of lapse of developmental fund”, the JRL said it wanted to convey to the government “the loud and clear message by the people of Kashmir that they boycott any kind of participation in elections and instead only demand right to self-determination”.

Calling for election boycott, the JRL said that the “enforced elections are nothing but another assault on people to harass them and cause them further inconvenience and agony”. They said that any participation in these elections is propagated as a people’s verdict in favour of India and hence they are used “as a means to dilute J&K disputed status and undo the holding of a referendum…”

Chairman of the All J&K Panchayat Association, Shafiq Mir told The Indian Express, “Hurriyat has expressed its ideology in boycotting these polls and our ideology is different from that. Our stand is that panchayat is a community institution, concerned with governance. We do not makes laws or engage with larger political issues. Boycotts should be restricted for assembly or parliamentary polls.”

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