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| Congress, PDP down, out in J&K | | | Early Times Report
JAMMU, May 24: Election results in the sensitive border State of Jammu and Kashmir, like all other parts of the country, are out. Like in the rest of the country, the electorate in the state again inflicted a crushing defeat on the Congress. It had fielded five candidates, 2 each in Jammu province and Kashmir Valley and one in the trans-Himalayan Ladakh but came out of the electoral exercise minus everything. And, its humiliating defeat was on expected lines as it had been flirting both with the Kashmir-based and Valley-centric and pro-autonomy National Conference (NC) of Farooq Abdullah and Omar Abdullah and pro-self-rule People's Democratic Party (PDP) of Mehbooba Mufti. It had no wares of its own to put in the political markets of Jammu province, Kashmir Valley and Cold-desert Ladakh for sale and, hence, was not in the reckoning. Its defeat was a forgone conclusion.
The PDP, which had been pouring venom on the Indian political system, pitching for a dialogue with Pakistan and its Kashmir-based Jihadi outfits like All-Party Hurriyat Conference, demanding withdrawal of all the Central laws from the state applied to it after 1953, opposing the presence of the army in Kashmir ever since its inception in 1999 and threatening New Delhi that "there will be nobody in the state to give shoulder to the national flag if any attempt was made to tinker with Articles 35A and Article 370", suffered the worst-ever defeat. Even its chief and former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti couldn't win from the Kashmir's Anantnag parliamentary constituency, once considered a very stronghold of the PDP. She came third. The worst part was that she got only a paltry 30,524 votes in constituency of 13,97,272 voters.
The PDP had fielded its candidates in all the Kashmir's three Lok Sabha constituencies and it failed to win even one. In 2014, it had won all the three seats from Kashmir with a reasonable margin. Reflecting on her defeat, Mehbooba Mufti said that "people have every right to express their anger for my failings".
The message for the Congress and the PDP is loud and clear: No space for the kind of politics they played. |
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