Indian soldiers in India-occupied Kashmir (IoK) killed two suspected fighters along the border with Pakistan, its army said on Monday, during campaigning for local elections in the disputed region.

IoK is gearing up for the first local assembly elections in a decade, with voting in the three-phased poll beginning on September 18.

The Indian army’s White Knight Corps said “two terrorists have been neutralised”, a term they use indicating the men had been killed, in the forested Nowshera region.

The army said military supplies and automatic weapons were seized.

About 500,000 Indian troops are deployed in the region, battling a 35-year fight that has killed tens of thousands of civilians, soldiers and fighters since 1989.

The territory has been without an elected government since 2019 when its partial autonomy was cancelled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and it was brought under New Delhi’s direct rule.

In August 2019, India had stripped Kashmiris of the special autonomy they had for seven decades through a rushed presidential order. By repealing Article 370 of the constitution, people from the rest of India will now have the right to acquire property in occupied Kashmir and settle there permanently.

Kashmiris as well as critics of India’s Hindu nationalist-led government see the move as an attempt to dilute the demographics of Muslim-majority Kashmir with Hindu settlers.

A total of 8.7 million people will be eligible to vote for the region’s assembly, with results expected on October 8.

Ahead of the vote, Modi is expected to address rallies for his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the southern Jammu areas of the occupied territory, which has a sizeable Hindu population.

In the past two years, more than 50 Indian soldiers were killed in clashes with fighters mostly in the occupied Jammu district.