As PM Modi comes bearing schemes for Kashmir, question uppermost is when will J-K see state polls

Several checkpoints have come up across Srinagar as part of heightened security measures, a day ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s scheduled visit to the city on Thursday, his first since the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019, soon after his government returned to power for a second term.

The PM, who was in Jammu last week, is likely to address a public rally at Bakshi Stadium and announce a slew of projects related to agriculture and tourism. The meeting, whose venue was shifted from the Sher-e-Kashmir International Conference Centre (SKICC), is likely to be attended by around two lakh people, including government officials, BJP workers and locals.

The last time Modi visited Kashmir was in February 2019, ahead of the Lok Sabha polls then, as part of his tour to all three regions of the former state. In April 2022, he had addressed elected representatives of local bodies on National Panchayat Day in Jammu.

The PM’s visit comes at a time when parties in the Valley are pressing the government to hold simultaneous Assembly elections with the ensuing Lok Sabha polls. J&K has not had an elected government since 2018.

“Whenever the situation deteriorated in Jammu and Kashmir in the past, we had leaders like H D Deve Gowda, I K Gujral, Manmohan Singh and Atal Bihari Vajpayee who tried to restore democracy, but for the first time we have a government at the Centre which doesn’t want to hold elections here,” former chief minister Omar Abdullah had said in December last year.

Since Article 370 was abrogated, scrapping J&K’s special status, and the bifurcation of the state into two Union territories – Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh — there has only been one meeting between the Centre and leaders of Kashmir, most of whom were