In the village of Dogripora, the first weekend of May began with a militant’s funeral and ended with a historic election. Dogripora lies in the district of Pulwama, in southern Kashmir, and, on Friday, May 3rd, thousands of people assembled to mourn Muhammad Lateef Dar, a young local man, known as Lateef Tiger, who had gone into the hills to join a separatist insurgency that has lasted thirty years and still threatens to spark war between India and Pakistan. Earlier that day, Lateef was trapped and killed by Indian soldiers in the neighboring district of Shopian.

Mourners packed a field the size of a soccer pitch. Women wore pastel and paisley head scarves; men wore mostly pherans, woollen tunics in shades of gray. Many sat on top of a brick wall or wedged themselves in the high branches of poplars to behold the new shaheed, or martyr. As mourners chanted, young men clambered onto the cot that carried the corpse, stroked its face, and smeared its blood on their cheeks. Periodically, the cot was raised and rotated to offer the crowd a view of Lateef. His body was wrapped in blankets, his head bandaged down to the upper lip.

“God is great,” the crowd called out.

Further back, a young man with a pompadour was incensed. “Look at him!” he said. “They’ve cut off his face!” The man, who would not give his name, believed that the Indian soldiers who killed Lateef had mutilated the body, which is sacrilege in Islam. I asked the man if he thought that the residents of Pulwama would vote in India’s national elections that Monday. “Only informers will be going to vote,” he said.

“And the families of police,” another man said.

“This does not make you want to vote,” a third man added. “This instills the feeling to fight India through war.”

India’s general election, which occurs every five years, is the largest democratic exercise in the world. Due to its scale, this year’s election was conducted in seven phases, spread between April 11th and May 19th, with different voting days for different states or regions. Many large states, such as Gujarat and Tamil Nadu—each with tens of millions of voters—were polled on single days. One constituency, however, voted in three phases, to insure that enough troops were in place to control possible separatist attacks or public violence: Anantnag, which comprises Pulwama and Shopian.

To many Indian voters this election season, Pulwama has been synonymous with terrorism. On February 14th, a suicide bomber, a local youth, blew up a convoy of the Central Reserve Police Force in Pulwama, killing forty personnel. The attack spurred India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who is the leader of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, to authorize retaliatory air strikes on an alleged militant camp deep inside Pakistan. An Indian jet was shot down in a dogfight the next morning, but Modi rose in the polls.

Again and again during his campaign, Modi brandished the name “Pulwama,” paired with the name “Balakot”—the site of the facility targeted by Indian jets—to boost his standing as a nationalist. To Modi’s supporters across the country, the two names have become synonymous with the threat that “anti-national forces” pose to India, and of the vengeance that—as his campaign contends—only Modi can exact.

At one rally, in Wardha, in the center of the country, Modi asked new voters, “Can your first vote be dedicated to the brave shaheed of Pulwama?” He wasn’t referring to the militants; Indians, including journalists, increasingly describe slain soldiers as shaheed, just as Kashmiris do slain rebels.

Since Modi’s victory, in 2014, the government has boosted nationalist passions in India, using various foils, Pakistan foremost among them. India’s neighbor has, in fact, stoked the militancy in Kashmir, co-opting indigenous armed groups, such as the Hizbul Mujahideen, to turn a secular, nationalist struggle into a religiously charged campaign for accession to Pakistan. Since the early nineteen-nineties, Pakistan has trained militants and sent them over the border to fight Indian forces. As a result, for most of its three decades, the insurgency in Kashmir was centered in the north, in areas closer to the Line of Control between the two countries.

However, Modi’s election-season displays of strength against Pakistan and its proxies ignore a reality that has emerged since he took power: a new wave of militancy in southern Kashmir that is far less dependent on foreign fighters or aid from across the border. The aggression is rooted in local young people, who are furious at what they see as India’s “regime of oppression,” and who are increasingly recruited via social media. Modi has succeeded at exacting symbolic revenge on Pakistan, but he has failed to prevent the alienation of young Kashmiris and the resurgence of a homegrown insurgency in Kashmir.

Lateef was a member of that insurgency. He spent his last moments pinned down, with two other rebels, in a house in Shopian, as police and Army units laid siege to the structure. As what the Indian government referred to as an “encounter” began, civilians pelted the security forces with stones, attempting to help the trapped militants escape. Government forces held the locals at bay with tear gas, nonlethal pellet guns, and rifle fire.

Lateef was the last of a photogenic squad of Hizbul Mujahideen fighters. Unlike earlier generations of mujahideen, his unit, led by the twentysomething Burhan Wani, used their real names, did not wear masks, and were popular on social media.

An image of them that went viral, in July of 2015, showed a dozen young men in fatigues, holding Kalashnikov assault rifles. Several smiled at the camera. Only one wore a mask. Wani, the commander, is in the center; the others recline into one another with the swagger and self-regard of college athletes. More selfies and group pics, in which they posed with automatic rifles in the scenic highlands, appeared on WhatsApp and Instagram, attracting many young Kashmiris to the insurgency.

The day after Lateef’s funeral, I talked to Rashid Para, a doctor at Pulwama District Hospital. Para has two buttons, blue and yellow, mounted on a wall behind his desk. Pushing either sets off a hospital-wide alert. A “Code Blue” is for a medical emergency, a “Code Yellow” for a “multi-casualty incident or disaster.”

Lateef’s death caused a Code Yellow; the hospital received three people who were injured in the protests that followed the killing. All told, around twenty civilians were injured in that day’s clashes with Indian security forces. Para told me that it reminded him of the day that Burhan Wani was killed. “I joined this hospital on July 7, 2016,” he said. “On July 8th, the Burhan incident happened. . . . It was as if I landed straight in the battlefield.” Following Wani’s death, in July, 2016, when Para asked young people injured in protests for their names, they answered, “Burhan, Burhan, Burhan.”

Burhan Wani was killed by the military during another “encounter,” and his death brought thousands of civilians not only into the streets but into the fray with Indian forces, a development that derailed the gradual progress toward reconciliation in Kashmir. By that summer’s end, almost a hundred civilians had been killed, with nearly nine thousand injured. Each week, in a dynamic that had never existed before, young Kashmiris gathered to hurl stones at police and soldiers, who responded with salvoes of bird-shot pellets that permanently blinded hundreds, including bystanders and children. In southern Kashmir, more and more young men—many of them teen-agers, but also schoolteachers, Ph.D. candidates, and police trainees—disappeared from their homes without warning. They reappeared later on WhatsApp videos, declaring their allegiance to armed struggle.