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| Will Mehbooba again make it to Lok Sabha? | | Fighting against odds in Anantnag | | Early Times Report
JAMMU, Apr 5: PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti finally filed her nomination papers from the crucial Anantnag parliamentary constituency on Wednesday. In 2004 and 2o14, Mehbooba Mufti had won this seat defeating the NC candidates.
BJP has fielded against her former MLC Sofi Yousuf. It would be too much to say that he would pose any challenge to her. There are two reasons: Hardly anybody takes him seriously in the constituency and more than that, he belongs to a party to which all in Kashmir are opposed ideologically. The NC has fielded against her former judge Hasnain Masoodi. He is a green-horn in politics and he would not be able to challenge Mehbooba Mufti and that, too, in a constituency, which was, and is, considered her pocket-borough.
The third candidate is the JKPCC chief Ghulam Ahmad Mir, a former minister. There will be contest between her and Mir because the Congress has some support-base in the Anantnag constituency. In fact, the Anantnag Lok Sabha constituency was considered the Congress' stronghold. The Congress candidate, Mohammad Shafi Qureshi, had won it in 967, 1971 and 1977. Courtesy: late Mufti Mohammad Sayeed.
However, things changed in the Ananatnag Lok Sabha Constituency after 1979. It was the NC which won this seat in 1980, 1984 and 1989. Sheikh Abdullah's close associate Ghulam Nabi Kochak won this seat in 1980, his wife Begum Akbar Jahan in 1984 and PL Handoo in 1989. In 1998, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed won this seat as a Congress candidate. The NC candidate Ali Mohammad Naik won this seat in the 1999 by-election. And, it was NC's candidate, Mehbooba Beg, (now in PDP), who won this seat in 2009.
It will be difficult to predict who would win and who would lose because the poll planks of the PDP, the NC and the Congress are almost the same. All the three are seeking people's mandate raking up emotive issues, including the separate status of J&K. Her biggest problem to convince the people of her constituency as to why she shook hands with the BJP after subverting the 2014 mandate the PDP had got. It's not easy because both the NC and the Congress have made the alliance between the PDP and the BJP a major election issue in this constituency. This is the reason that she has been trying to tell the people that she is more pro-Kashmir and holding out promises that she, if voted to power in the state, will lift ban on the Jamaat-e-Islami and JKLF and force New Delhi to hold dialogue with Pakistan and Hurriyat to decide the J&K's future. |
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