'...or go to jail.' 'The government is getting them silenced.'

'The whole Kashmiri population is seemed to be a suspect community. This status is not good.'

'PM Modi would have swept the elections in Kashmir after notebandi but then he scrapped Article 370 so all his good work went down the drain.'

'Ladakh has become a hollow UT.' 'Bureaucrats from Delhi rule Ladakh and there is no attention paid to the grievances of the people.'

Syed Firdaus Ashraf/Rediff.com comes across a Ganesh temple in Kashmir's summer capital that remains a well kept secret.

'The Abdullah family is the problem and facilitator of the instability that we are seeing in Kashmir.'

'My son was not killed because he was a Hindu.'

'Article 370 is now dug 70 feet deep in the ground. It cannot come out.'

'INDIA will easily cross 50 seats out of 90 in Jammu and Kashmir.'

'I went to jail and met my father to convince him to join politics and believe in the Constitution.'

'Afzal Guru became a victim of Pakistan's conspiracy. He was used as a means, just like all other innocent Kashmiris.'

'We want to ensure that no government in J&K will be formed without our support.'

'If the country felt very strongly about the BJP, then why did the country not put money where the mouth is?'

Tral, the former hotbed of terrorism, rocks to the music of democracy.

'The wave of terrorism is over in Kashmir. Local people do not support it.'

'Who are Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti to issue certificates?'

In 2022 Nanaji Dembi pulled down the Hurriyat office board in Srinagar, an act of defiance that grabbed headlines. Despite such nationalistic bravado, the BJP has denied him a ticket for the assembly election.

If Rashid cannot be the king, he could be the kingmaker after October 8 when the results to the J&K assembly are declared.

'We called him Sher-e-Kashmir but we realised he was no lion but a pussycat who surrendered.'

At Srinagar's famed Lal Chowk, Rediff.com's Syed Firdaus Ashraf meets a computer engineer who drives an auto for a living and discovers that Kashmiris are more interested in finding jobs than discussing the assembly election.