Andrew Mueller explains the significance of holding local elections in Jammu and Kashmir. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
India's general election, held earlier this year, attracted a great deal of attention, and rightly so.
It was the biggest democratic exercise in human history.
A monumental logistical undertaking that saw around 650 million ballots cast in a country of wildly various landscape and not always reliable infrastructure.
In one instance, a polling station was built in a remote mountain village to serve a single family of living beyond the reach of electricity.
Election officials schlepped seven hours in each direction to ensure that those votes were counted.
Happily, for admirers of the resourcefulness demonstrated by India in guaranteeing the franchise, another Indian election is taking place this week, and one in which all the physical and political challenges of such an endeavour are magnified.
For the first time in a decade, they are voting for a local assembly in Jammu and Kashmir.
Explaining every reason why this is an especially big deal could consume every explainer between now and the death of the sun.
To contemplate Jammu and Kashmir, even briefly, is to be inescapably reminded of the remark attributed to Lord Palmerston, mid 19th century Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, about the then pressing diplomatic question of Schleswig Holstein.
That only three people had ever understood it.
Prince Albert, who was dead, a Danish statesman who'd gone mad thinking about it and passed Palmerston himself who'd forgotten about it.
But the basics are these, with due apologies for the necessity of skipping quite a lot of detail.
But seriously, if any listeners fancy driving themselves all the way around the twist or reckon they've sorted out the Middle east before lunch and fancy a real challenge, there are absolute reams of claim, counterclaim, counter counterclaim and any amount of reasonable competing aspirations, grievances, real and imaginary and just seething sectarian nonsense you can be getting to grips with.
So when India became independent after World War II, it was split into two countries.
Hindu majority India, Muslim majority Pakistan, which has not proved a recipe for neighbourly harmony.
Within that split, a subsplit was made of the border state of Kashmir between the Indian administered Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, now a separate territory, and the Pakistani administered Gilgit, Baltistan and Azad Kashmir.
China also holds a couple of chunks of Kashmir, but we really don't have all day.
Neither India nor Pakistan has ever been happy with the arrangement, not least because within Jammu and Kashmir there is a further split between Hindu majority Jammu and Muslim majority Kashmir.
As a consequence of all of the above, three wars have been fought over Kashmir between India and Pakistan, along with uncountable skirmishes and attacks involving insurgents and militias to bring us extremely briskly up to the present day.
In 2019, India revoked the special autonomous status long enjoyed by Jammu and Kashmir, seeking to emphasize the belief of India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi that Jammu and Kashmir is just another Indian state and that there should be no argument as to whom the territory belongs.