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Separatist in Indian Kashmir to contest polls
By AIJAZ HUSSAIN,Associated Press Writer AP - 2 hours 58 minutes ago
SRINAGAR, India - A separatist leader in Indian-administered Kashmir announced plans Saturday to run in upcoming national polls, becoming the first senior separatist to contest elections since an armed rebellion against Indian rule began two decades ago.
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"Fighting elections is a change of strategy, not a change of ideology," Sajjad Gani Lone told reporters in Srinagar, the capital of Jammu-Kashmir state. He is running for the federal Parliament.
Anti-India separatists have rejected all previous elections in the disputed Himalayan region as an exercise by the Indian government to widen its control over the restive area. They say only a vote for the right to self-determination is valid in the region.
Lone, who heads a breakaway faction of the Jammu-Kashmir People's Conference, said he would run in the elections "with a commitment to use this mechanism as a method to represent the voice of the Kashmiri people."
"I'm going to represent Kashmir in India, not India in Kashmir," he said.
The group was founded by his father, Abdul Gani Lone, before an armed insurgency erupted in disputed Kashmir in 1989. It became part of the region's main separatist alliance, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, in 1993.
However, after the assassination of Abdul Gani Lone by unidentified assailants in 2002, the party split and Sajjad Lone left the alliance.
Lone had supported a boycott of last year's state elections in Jammu-Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state.
But Kashmiris largely ignored the boycott and later Lone acknowledged that it had been a "mistake."
Anti-India sentiment runs deep in Kashmir, where most people favor independence from India or a merger with Pakistan. Kashmir is divided between the two nuclear-armed neighbors, who both claim the Himalayan region in its entirety and have fought two wars over it.
Militant separatist groups have been fighting since 1989 to end Indian rule. More than 68,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the uprising and subsequent Indian crackdown.
Voting in the national elections will be held April 16, April 23, April 30, May 7 and May 13 and ballots will be counted May 16.
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