SRINAGAR (Reuters) - Kashmir's senior separatist leader Sajjad Gani Lone, who has opposed Indian rule in the disputed Himalayan region for decades, in a surprising move on Saturday said he would contest the imminent general elections.
Lone, chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir People's Conference and the first senior separatist to offer to contest an Indian election since a revolt broke out in Kashmir in 1989, said he wanted to take his struggle to parliament in New Delhi.
"Fighting elections is a change of strategy, not ideology," Lone told a news conference.
"I will contest polls with a commitment to use this mechanism as a method to represent the voice of the Kashmiri people and to take the strength and merits of our aspirations to the central stage of India," he said.
Lone, who led some of the massive anti-Indian demonstrations in Kashmir last year, will contest the elections in Baramulla, one of the six parliamentary constituencies in north Kashmir.
His sister, Shabnum Lone, a prominent lawyer, lost the state election last year in the same area.
Hardline separatist Syed Ali Shah Geelani has called for a boycott of the April-May elections, but Lone said there was a need to change strategy after last year's state elections, which despite a boycott call saw a turnout of more than 60 percent.
That was seen as a gain for New Delhi, though many said it was a vote for better governance, not acceptance of Indian rule.
"Those who voted in assembly elections last year have compromised the blood of martyrs. I appeal to people to completely boycott the (general) election," Geelani said on Friday at a rally against the elections, which begin next week.
Lone walked out of Kashmir's main separatist alliance, the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference, after his father, senior separatist leader Abdul Gani Lone, was assassinated by unidentified gunmen in 2002.
In 2007 he put forward a peace plan entitled "Achievable Nationhood" to unify the divided territory, claimed both by India and Pakistan, and to give it autonomy.
The nuclear-armed South Asian rivals have fought two of their three wars over Kashmir since independence from Britain in 1947. They began a peace process in 2004 but New Delhi suspended that dialogue after the Mumbai attacks last November.
Officials say more than 47,000 people have been killed in the Muslim-majority region in the revolt against Indian rule. Human rights groups put the figure at around 60,000 dead or missing.
Many Kashmiris said they were disappointed with Lone's decision. "It is a national shame. Today he is standing tall on 80,000 bodies," said Zubiar Ahmad, a resident of Srinagar. "History has never forgiven traitors."
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