Voters outside a polling booth in Ajas in Kashmir. (AFP)

Bandipore, Nov. 17: Yasir Arafat had braved bullets and batons to join freedom marches organised by separatists. Today, he braved a bone-numbing chill and a boycott call — to vote.

The 31-year-old ignored not only the separatists opposed to the polls but also the don’t-vote pleas of his father Muhammad Akbar, a retired government officer and a Jamat-e-Islami sympathiser in Muslimabad village.

Arafat didn’t let anything come in the way of friendship. “Yes, it hurts the (boycott) movement but I am here (at the polling booth) because of my friendship with the nephew of the local People’s Democratic Party candidate,” he said, showing no sign of regret at having defied the boycott to cast his life’s first vote.

Many like Arafat, who proudly claimed he had taken part in the separatist rallies at Pampore and Eidgah in August, were on a different mission today: to vote in Jammu and Kashmir’s first phase of polling and, in doing so, reveal a dichotomy that has become integral to the Valley.

By evening, when chief electoral officer B.R. Sharma put the turnout at 55 per cent, the figure seemed better than what mainstream parties like the PDP and the National Conference had expected. Ten constituencies voted in the first of the seven-legged polls that end on December 24.

A shocked Hurriyat tried to cut a brave face. Hurriyat co-ordinator Bashir Ahmad Bhat said the boycott campaign was successful but the “voting percentage has been manipulated”.

Like Arafat — whose father named him after the Palestine icon — many voters swear by azaadi and elections in the same breath. The reasons to vote range from jobs to roads, preference for local candidates over outsiders or Shia-Sunni rivalries.

If it was friendship for Arafat, it was the desire to see his Safapora village develop that motivated Muhammad Dilawar Mir to show up at the polling booth. There was something else, too: “We want to live peacefully without harassment by security forces. These (mainstream) parties can help us do so.”

Mir had participated in separatist rallies but thinks the two issues, the larger Kashmir problem and elections, are different. “Who will take care of our local needs?” he asked.

Fayyaz Ahmad trudged to the poll booth because his Ajas village could benefit if “our local candidate wins the election”.

Many appeared to think like Fayyaz: men and women queued up in large numbers at booths, with security forces sometimes having to discipline the enthusiastic voters.

In Khaloosa village, across the bridge over the Madhumati stream that demarcates Bandipore town, people jostled for space inside a school to vote.