A boy throws a stone at policemen during anti-poll protests in Srinagar. (Reuters)

Ganderbal, Nov. 22: The bullet’s riposte to the ballot has not taken long to arrive — an election office in Sopore blasted to ribbons overnight, a grenade lobbed at the tail of Mehbooba Mufti’s rally in Kangan, a rash of angry, often violent, anti-election protests emerging from mosques after Friday prayers.

As Kashmir braces for the second phase of polling tomorrow, the hidden but omnipresent hand is mounting a concerted effort to wipe out the queues of Phase I and make this election look more like a Kashmiri election — shivered by the report of the gun, shrunken by the prospect it could be used again.

Low-intensity though they are, these strikes are militancy’s first statement on the election and there is no ambiguity about their message: kill the voting bug before it becomes a Valley-wide epidemic.

Dusting his shop-front wares on the crossroads of Beehama, Osman Ahmed Dar shakes his head with practised despondency. “Perhaps it was too good to last. It was a happy astonishment to us that so many people had come out to vote without hindrance. Perhaps it was too much to stomach for those that are opposed. Now, Allah only knows….”

Dar has seen a new mood sweep up and down this shopping hub these past weeks — an incessant mill of rallies and roadshows that have left behind a rainbow litter of banners and buntings, now banked along the roadsides in heaps of fallen chinar leaves.

“I wasn’t expecting a campaign of such enthusiasm after the Amarnath protests,” Dar mutters, “but somehow, I was expecting some sort of trouble to erupt. It has now, and I am no longer sure the high polling of the first phase can be repeated.”

The blast from the megaphones mounted on the mosque behind is getting more frenetic by the minute. “This is an appeal in the name of Allah, don’t turn out to vote for infidels, this is the hour of determining whether you are with God or with those that stand opposed to Him…. Rise, believers of Kashmir, turn your face against this sinful election…. The time has now come for the faithful to be separated from the infidels, don’t tempt the wrath of the heavens….” The cavalcades of democracy are pressing on regardless, possessed of their own spiritual and temporal convictions.

“Nothing new about the Hurriyat invoking Allah’s name to enforce a boycott,” smirks a People’s Democratic Party worker awaiting Mehbooba Mufti’s arrival across the street from the mosque. “Allah is not their property, He has not appointed the Hurriyat His agent, He belongs to all.”

This is the last day of campaigning in Ganderbal and the nay-sayers have lost the voice-vote to the ayes. Nowhere is the decibel of that triumph —temporary though it may be — higher than on the trail of Omar Abdullah, the National Conference boss who is trying to reincarnate himself as servant of the people.

Omar lost the 2002 election from this family pocket borough on a tidal anti-wave that deposited the Abdullah clan in the political wilderness. He has returned humbled and pleading.

“Forgive me the mistakes of the past,” he tells gathering after village gathering. “Give me a chance and I shall prove to you I am a true successor to my grandfather and father.”

He’s opened the family album in pursuit of the family fief. Across Ganderbal, portraits of Sheikh Abdullah, Begum Akbarjehan Abdullah, once known as Madre-Meharban (the benevolent mother), and Farooq Abdullah usher the scion to his constituents. Clearly, this isn’t a campaign Omar is convinced about winning on his own.

But he’s trying. With apology and apprenticeship. He’s taken lessons in his mother tongue and can address the crowds in Kashmiri, if only broken, if only haltingly.

“Tell me the truth, aren’t you as badly off as you were before the last election?” he asks a gathering at Korg, deep in the Ganderbal countryside. “I have come to tell you I am going to change that, please believe me.”

There is a visible enthusiasm about the changed Omar. Every other sentence is interrupted by ripples of applause. When he smiles, they start raising slogans that would have done his grandfather, the Sher-i-Kashmir, proud. He’s speaking the people’s tongue. He’s dressed in a pheran, the traditional Kashmiri winter cloak. He does not seem bothered that his imported sneakers are caked in the mud spawned by the melting of first snow. He’s probably tasted earth and he is exuding a confidence you couldn’t see on his face in 2002.

“I should win decently enough,” he tells you as he tears through the crowd to the bullet-proof Safari that will take him to his last meeting of this campaign, “This is not like the last time, I can sense it.”

What of the reports of violence pouring in from across the Valley, though? “Well, I would not be here if I was afraid of the gun, and neither would these people, we are both pushing the limits of defiance.”

That is what, eventually, this entire election may be about.