Kashmir has suffered eight years of bloody turmoil during which secessionists have shot and bombed and kidnapped; Indian soldiers have fought back with mass detentions and torture; and a total of nearly 20,000 people have been killed, many in the cross fire. Last week India held elections in the embattled Himalayan valley in the hope of buoying Kashmiris' faith in self-determination: the kind that comes from voting, not following young men with guns.

But that's what voters did anyway. At dawn on election day, male residents of Tral, a town 40 km south of the summer capital, Srinagar, were awakened by armed Indian soldiers and herded to the polls. At noon the soldiers came back for their wives, mothers and sisters. Then the men in uniform promised a final check in the evening to make certain that the index finger of each resident was marked with indelible ink, applied at the voting center to prevent voter fraud. At a polling place in Tral, a shopkeeper too frightened to state his name said, "I've come here to vote out of fear." Added a 70-year-old former government employee: "It's a tragedy, it's a shame. They should weep over this election."

That sentiment, and the pattern of forced voting, was repeated throughout the Kashmir valley last week, and it bode ill for New Delhi's strategy of trying to simmer down the insurgency. The soldiers' mission was to ensure a more credible turnout than in the 1989 parliamentary election, the last to be held in the area, in which 95% of the electorate snubbed India by boycotting the polls. Since 1990, the state has been ruled directly from New Delhi, and for five years its seats in the national parliament have been vacant. Last week India wanted a clear vote of local confidence in the restoration of the democratic process, even if voters had to be herded along country roads by rifle-toting members of the Border Security Force, or BSF. In Darsera village, carpet weaver Nissar Ahmed, 21, recounted, "The BSF men came to my house at 7:15 and said they'll shoot me if I don't vote." In Sopore a public-works-department employee reported, "The BSF men told us if we talk to the press, they'll break our legs."

But once the polls closed, the government was eager to describe to an incredulous press corps a "successful" exercise with a turnout of more than 40%. "It is a mandate from the people for the return of peace and normalcy," said Ashok Kumar, the top bureaucrat in the region. In New Delhi senior officials convened a special briefing where they insisted that they had received no complaints of coercion.

The nabobs from New Delhi surely aren't trying to fool the Kashmiris with such statements, or even themselves. But Indian officials are hoping lightning may strike twice. The ferocious Sikh separatist movement in the state of Punjab, which accounted for more than 20,000 deaths in the 1980s, was defused by state assembly elections held in 1992. At the time, few believed they would have any effect, and voter turnout was only 22.9%. But the new state government cracked down hard on the pro-independence militants--and received surprising support from the population. After a decade of bloodshed and hardship, the Punjabis were ready for peace, and had it within eight months.

Unfortunately, Kashmir is a very different kettle of sharks. The Sikhs were angry with New Delhi because of the 1984 assault on the Golden Temple at Amritsar. That operation, ordered by Indira Gandhi, became the motivation for her assassination later that year. But Kashmir's problems with India date back to 1947, when Hindu maharaja Hari Singh signed his largely Muslim population over to India instead of Pakistan. Kashmiris are almost obsessive on the subject of the betrayals they've suffered from New Delhi since then. An important one was a bogus state assembly election in March 1987, which the government of Rajiv Gandhi helped rig and which transformed chronic Kashmiri disgruntlement into an armed insurgency. With that specific precedent, India may have blundered in thinking an election based on coercion could have helped in any way. "People don't want elections," said Ghulam Nabi Mir, a schoolteacher. "They want self-determination. Let the army and the BSF withdraw from this area, and not one man will cast his vote." Others forced to the polls employed the word azadi, which in Urdu literally means freedom but signifies either independence from India or union with Pakistan, depending on which insurgent group is talking.

Last week's elections were for two seats in the national parliament in New Delhi. Polling for two other seats took place in early May, and two more seats will be voted on this week, including one from the Srinagar district, concluding India's 11th general election. In addition, New Delhi officials are talking about early July for state legislative polls, the cornerstone of their effort to bring peace to the valley. But the Kashmiris don't seem ready to play along. Last week's parliamentary elections were boycotted by credible figures on all sides of the fence, including the pro-India National Conference, which governed the state for most of the past half-century, and the All Party Hurriyat Conference, which stands for self-determination but some of whose leaders are perceived to be moderate. Among the main candidates were former militants who abandoned the fight for independence and now want lucrative political careers. The stance of the major militant groups was that the populace must stay away from the polls; soldiers who strong-armed voters to the polling booths defended their action by saying the average Kashmiri wanted to be forced to vote so as to avoid reprisals from the militants. The proof will come on June 1, when there will be a tally of voters who deliberately invalidated their ballots--by voting for more than one candidate, for example--as a protest.

From New Delhi's point of view, elections were not so much a surefire solution to the mess in Kashmir as the easiest political option. A more promising path would have been concrete steps to restore the autonomy promised to Kashmir in 1947 but whittled away over the decades. The pro-India National Conference said that was a prerequisite for its participation in elections. But there is little sympathy for Kashmiri demands among Indians south of the Pir Panjal mountains and quite a dose of antipathy. The Bharatiya Janata Party of newly installed Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has long promised to reduce Kashmir's autonomy further, although his wobbly government decided last week not to push through its specific proposals on that theme. Whether any future Prime Minister is bold enough to go in the opposite direction is doubtful. Meanwhile, the havoc continues. Two days before last week's vote, a Kashmiri separatist group took credit for a car bomb in New Delhi that killed 13. Human Rights Watch/Asia released a report in New York City last week charging India with sponsoring its own militant groups, in effect Kashmiri contras, who attack mainstream militants as well as human-rights observers, journalists and medical workers. "They can grind us to dust," vows Haseena Bano, a student in Sopore. "But we will still shout azadi."

--Reported by Maseeh Rahman/Srinagar