Bashir Assad
Jammu, March 6: Elections to 5 Upper House seats will be conducted through open ballot tomorrow from 10 am to 3 pm in the Assembly Secretariat with the Secretary Assembly as the presiding officer.
The polling will take place under Government circular no. 66 to the 4 seats of Kashmir region and the lone reserved seat of Doda. The results will be declared at 4 pm on the same day.
Pertinently the 3 candidates for 3 Jammu seats were declared elected unopposed as there were only 3 candidates in the fray after the scrutiny of nomination papers. However, for 4 seats of Kashmir region there are 5 candidates in fray which include Naeem Akhtar of PDP, Muzaffar Parray of Congress, Showkat Ganai and Abdul Majeed Bhat of National Conference and Independent SK Dudha supported by PDP, PDF, CPI(M), BJP and Panthers Party. On Doda reserve seat there is straight contest between Congress nominee Naresh Kumar Gupta and Panthers Party nominee Chowdhary Mohammad Iqbal. The 3 candidates declared unopposed from Jammu region include Davinder Singh Rana of National Conference, Rani Baloria of Congress and Yashpal Sharma of PDP.
If both the factions of BJP, as the indicators are there, support Dudha the ruling NC-Congress alliance is likely to loose one more seat from the Kashmir region as PDP has 4 surplus votes, BJP (both factions) has 11, NPP has 3, PDF has 1 and CPI(M) has 1, when he requires only 18 votes. |
