SRINAGAR, India — Almost anywhere else in India, it would have been unremarkable, even mundane. But here in the heart of the country’s most restive state, it was something of a stunner: Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a routine campaign speech here on Monday at a rally of his Hindu nationalist party, waved to thousands of fans and flew off in a helicopter — all without serious incident.

Some longtime observers of the conflict here watched the rally simply to marvel at the unlikelihood of it all.

“If you’d told me 10 years ago that there would be a B.J.P. rally in Srinagar addressed by Narendra Modi, I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Vikram Chandra, the chief executive of the NDTV news channel, referring to the Bharatiya Janata Party. Mr. Chandra, who earned a reputation as one of India’s leading journalists while covering the conflict in Kashmir, added, “The normality of it all is the story.”

Mr. Modi’s party has a history of tension with Muslims, who are in the majority in Kashmir, and Mr. Modi himself was long seen as his party’s most divisive figure. He was chief minister in Gujarat State when more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed in sectarian rioting in 2002.