India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the main city in Himalayan Kashmir on Thursday to campaign for his party in the local election, the first such vote since New Delhi stripped the disputed region’s semi-autonomy in 2019.

The vote is the first in a decade, and the first since Modi’s Hindu nationalist government in 2019 scrapped the region’s special status and downgraded the former state to a federally governed territory.

With fresh faces emerging to challenge the traditional political powerhouses, the region’s political dynamics already appear to be changing.