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Having received international assurance that Pakistan would curb cross-border infiltrations into disputed Kashmir, India on Monday said it would allow foreign observers and international media to watch and report on crucial state assembly elections due in September in the Indian part of the territory.

''Anybody from anywhere in the world would be given access to the polling stations,'' India's chief election commissioner J M Lyngdoh said at a televised press briefing on preparations for the elections in Srinagar, summer capital of the state.

''We are doing this deliberately and media from all parts of the world would be given facilities to cover the polls as they are the best observers,'' Lyngdoh, an constitutional functionary with enormous powers, said.

India made the announcement to show that it is keen on ensuring free and fair polls in a territory where it says Pakistan-based 'jihadists' are active, as the world's eyes are once again focused on Kashmir as the security flashpoint in the subcontinent.

But New Delhi is also not keen to ''internationalise'' its 52-year-old dispute with neighbouring Pakistan over the complete possession of Kashmir, a Muslim-dominated principality whose Hindu ruler opted to accede to India under a plan where all princely states were required to join one or the other of the new countries following partition and independence from Britain in 1947.

Rigged election

But while Lyngdoh, a former career bureaucrat from the north-eastern state of Meghalya, said foreigners could come observe the September poll, he clarified that no foreigner would be ''invited'' to join the official team of observers since Indian law did not provide for it.

A popular movement for an independent Kashmir, a third of which has been held by Pakistan since a 1949 ceasefire, turned violent in 1989. At the time, officials were said to have blatantly rigged an election in the state, encouraging political leaders to join the militant, secessionist Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Force (JKLF).

Before long, the JKLF was marginalised by hardened 'mujahideen' or Islamic fighters demobilised at the end of the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and sent into Kashmir by their handlers in Pakistan's shadowy Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).

Chief among these groups, which have been fighting for Kashmir's merger with Pakistan rather than its independence from India, are the Lashkar-e-Toiba (Soldiers of God), Jaish-e-Mohammed (Army of Mohammed) and the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (Freedom Fighters Movement).

India responded by increasing its military presence in the sensitive state and curbing special autonomy rights granted it on accession to India.

Daily clashes

Some 50,000 people are said to have died in the past 12 years in almost daily clashes between the armed forces and 'mujahideen' groups, with the brunt of the violence borne by ordinary Kashmiris.

After a 'jihadist' suicide squad made an aborted bid to blow up the Indian Parliament in December, India moved more than 700,000 troops to its border with Pakistan, and deployed its air force and navy.

Pakistan denied involvement in the attack and responded by threatening to use its nuclear arsenal and carrying out a series of tests of its nuclear-capable missiles.

The possibility of an all-out war between the nuclear-capable countries worsened after yet another attack on a military encampment near Jammu, summer capital of Kashmir, on May 14, which left 31 people dead. The victims were mostly wives and children of army servicemen.

By the end of May, an alarmed international community began intense shuttle-diplomacy between Islamabad and New Delhi, by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

This diplomacy resulted in a pledge by Pakistan President Gen Pervez Musharraf to put an end to cross-border infiltration into Indian Kashmir and permanently close down 'jihadist' camps set up in the Pakistan controlled part of the territory across the Line of Control (LoC), which serves as the de facto border and which New Delhi would like to see converted into an international border. .

New Delhi turned down an offer by Rumsfeld for the internationalpatrolling of the LoC, but accepted US technology and equipment for high technology ground surveillance equipment to stop infiltration across the LoC.

Under threat

More importantly for India, Straw and Rumsfeld publicly agreed with New Delhi's view that it was under threat from al-Qaeda militants flushed out from Afghanistan by the US 'war on terrorism' and had begun infiltrating into Kashmir through Pakistan's mountainous northern territories.

''We certainly think that there are al-Qaeda operating in the northern part of Pakistan, as Secretary Rumsfeld said, operating in Kashmir. And certainly elsewhere,'' Straw said told the British Broadcasting Corp. last week.

Straw earlier told the House of Commons: ''India has long charged that such terrorism has had the covert support of successive Pakistani governments, and in particular by the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate in Pakistan. Her Majesty's government accepts that there is a direct link between ISID and these groups.''

Straw's comments, following his visit to the sub-continent at the end of May, drew sharp criticism in Pakistan's press.

Commented the English-language daily The Dawn : '' Mr Straw went out of his way to pander to India's obduracy. It is also quite ironic to see a foreign secretary from Britain — a country that played no small role in creating the mess in Kashmir in the first place — indirectly brushing aside that complex issue as one centreing around terrorism.''

Indian officials have often countered charges of rigging elections in Kashmir and of coercing people to participate — by saying that free and fair elections are not possible because voters and moderate politicians fear reprisals by militant groups who order boycotts of polls in the territory.

Shot dead

Abdul Ghani Lone, one of Kashmir's leading politicians, was shot dead on May 21 in Srinagar after he indicated support for the September elections. His son reacted by saying publicly that the ISI was behind the killing, but retracted later under apparent pressure from the All Party Hurriyat Committee (APHC), a 23-party group that opposes elections.

Leaders in the ruling National Conference of Chief Minister FarooqAbdullah say that the Hurriyat leaders have no real popularity in the state, fear contesting any election and are hiding behind boycotts ordered by the ISI.

''Hurriyat leaders are welcome to participate in the elections if they want to test their so-called representative character,'' said Ali Mohammed Sagar, a minister in Abdullah's Cabinet.

Chief Election Commissioner Lyngdoh warned that this time, members of the security forces would face legal action if they were found interfering in the polls.

''Uniformed forces are not there to rig elections or increase the poll percentage. Their job is to sanitise the area and reassure voters who should go on their own to cast their votes,'' he said.

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