Consider this a revised preface to the state of democracy in the prided crown of the mother of democracies.

The last time Kashmiris voted to elect those who would govern them was in 2014. The opportunity and the arrangements for mandating a democratic order are not currently available to the people.

There is word afloat on the staging of a local election later this year, but Kashmiris have little idea what they will be called upon to vote for. What is certain is that it is no longer possible for Kashmiris to vote as they did until 2014, courtesy the stunning enactments of August 5, 2019. There is no more a state called Jammu and Kashmir. There is no more the Ladakh-Kargil region attached to it. There is no more an Assembly for the people to elect; nobody represents them.

Democracy has had a disrupted, often farcical, run in Kashmir. At the moment the entire package is in interlude, in a shadowland between a momentous dissolution and a potential restoration. The Valley sends only three representatives to the Lok Sabha, a patently insignificant number in a House of 543, but it is near metaphoric as a democracy dipstick.

I was here in the Valley the morning a state of the Indian union was, for the first time, sundered and downgraded to two Union Territories. Ominous preparations had preceded the dismantling of Jammu and Kashmir. Its most palpable portent was the import and ordering of formidable soldiery; the night before, they were everywhere the gaze went — the menace of men wielding lethal machinery.

Few at that time knew why, but even the birds could sniff the foreboding; they huddled away from the booted battalions taking position. In the darkened shadows of night, an unseen hand moved to unbounded muffling: a curfew freeze on movement, a remotely imposed bar on communication — no calling, no messaging, neither sound nor syllable. Landlines gone. Mobile networks gone. Broadband gone. Cable television gone. Civic life mummified. Kashmir etherised. The countdown to a comprehensive and protracted stilling.

It was to surface from that induced coma, its constitutional feathers ripped, its body carved, dismembered and downgraded to manageable contours, its prominent “anti-bodies” identified and shuttered. Other known and potential “germs” scraped out and packed off to distant quarantines. A strike surgically imagined for none other would have done the job. To play on a phrase that will likely have immediate recall in these parts, what emerged from the operation was a moth-eaten Kashmir.

Gupkar Road — Srinagar’s power mile — had to be cauterised and cleansed. Gupkar, very often viewed by successive Delhi regimes as a chronic trigger to Kashmiri misconduct. Gupkar, very often also viewed as the seat of nativist monopoly on power, home to chieftains of the National Conference (NC) and the People’s Democractic Party (PDP), who took turns in power and who Prime Minister Narendra Modi disparagingly described as “baap-bete ki sarkar” and “baap-beti ki sarkar”.

The planners of August 5, 2019, had identified the Gupkar residences as the core of Kashmir’s carbuncle; a knife had to be run through their monopoly on power, and the possibility of any recurrence stitched up.

Chains and locks fell on the private Gupkar residence of Farooq Abdullah, and a garlanding of concertina added to ensure nobody was confused they were looking at a prison house. Omar Abdullah was picked up from his house not far down the road, and Mehbooba Mufti from the charming Fair View cottage up the street; both were thrown into Hari Niwas, a sprawling government property also on Gupkar.

Omar would return to Gupkar to share home space at the family residence with his father. Mehbooba would eventually have to pack her worldly goods at Fair View and move beyond Srinagar’s city limits to a northern suburb.

And power? Its local address is no longer Gupkar. Its current local address is, as a matter of fact, not a local address at all. The location of power has moved from Gupkar to Ghazipur, the east UP home of lieutenant governor Manoj Sinha, the man who bosses this Union Territory. The People’s Alliance for Gupkar Declaration (PAGD), a political conglomerate formed in reaction to the abrogations of August 2019, has dissipated; most of those who signed up and posed together on the common ground of opposing New Delhi’s sanctions are now wrestling with each other.

It’s moot how long the interruption over which Sinha presides will last. Elections — should they be held before September, as the Supreme Court has advised and the powers in Delhi have promised — do not guarantee the restoration of statehood to Jammu and Kashmir; they could well be held to elect an Assembly to represent the Union Territory of Delhi. In effect, in the eyes of Kashmiris, a moth-eaten Assembly with moth-eaten powers to those who will be elected to it.

Kashmiris have, over the years, underlined their aversion to voting. Elections are not something they have easily or willingly owned; democracy is a process they have consciously not invested in. Less than 15 per cent turned out in the Srinagar Lok Sabha polls in 2019, less than 35 per cent in Baramulla, and barely 9 per cent in the militant hotbed of Anantnag. Be not surprised if that were to change in 2024. Be not surprised if Kashmir bucks the low voter trend elsewhere and significant numbers line up at the booths.

There isn’t a separatist-dictated boycott call over these elections. There is, instead, a widespread sense among Kashmiris that they need to tell New Delhi they disapprove of how they were diminished and divided without their approval in 2019. There also probably is a more significant reason: the interruption since the last time Kashmiris were elected from among Kashmiris to run the affairs of Kashmir has been too long. The Lok Sabha election isn’t going to achieve that. But the vote will mark their attendance in the register of relevance and send a message to Delhi — We’re here, the interruption you’ve imposed must end.

Kashmir votes on May 13, 20 and 25