Employment The Key Poll Issue In J & K
A just administration, free of the corruption and nepotism that has marked almost every previous regime the state has had, is all they want, say Kashmiris in towns and villages across the valley as campaigning peaks for the final phase of polling in the valley on Saturday.
Garib ke liye kuchh nahin badalta (Nothing changes for the poor), laments a wizened old man in Lar village, as he displays rice, grey with dirt, which he has just bought from the government fair price shop.
Of course, ending militancy is also a priority, but this is almost taken for granted. In fact, few Kashmiris say they want the new government to get the army withdrawn yet.
Most people say militancy is down to just five or ten per cent of what it was, but they fear that it will rise again from the ashes of the secessionist movement if the army is withdrawn at this stage.
Far more important on the agenda of most voters is the disarming of pro-government militant groups, such as the Kuka Parray-led Ikhwan-ul Muslimoon. Even those Kashmiris who acknowledge that these groups still have a role in countering militancy say they should be enrolled in some official force, even a temporary one, so that they would be accountable under the law.
A large number of Kashmiris talk of Farooq Abdullah's promise of autonomy of the sort the state had until 1953, but they are inspired by it mainly as something to show for the 50,000 martyrs and for the seven years of sacrifice. They say it will give them a sense of achievement rather than of defeat.
Significantly, though, it is men like Gul Mohammed War, who was the Muslim United Front's candidate for Kangan in 1987 and has been a prominent sympathiser of militancy, who talk in this vein.
Many ordinary Kashmiris say autonomy will only make the politicians more powerful and less accountable.
The movement would never have begun if it wasn't for the corruption and nepotism that we have had to face after graduation, say a couple of young men in a village near Chadoora.
They add that the government job which one of them got last year (eight years after graduating) would not have been possible without a bribe if politicians were running the government again.
Perhaps a government free of corruption and nepotism would satisfy the Kashmiri people. For the expectations of employment among a people used to being pampered by governments eager to buy patriotism with sops cannot be met without haemorrhaging the national economy.
The state's bureaucracy is already thrice as large as could possibly be necessary. And far more graduates and post-graduates than can be employed in the government have been produced ever since Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed underwrote free education for all when he was trying to win the affection of the valley after he was installed in Sheikh Abdullah's place in 1953.