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| Hazratbal fiasco | | PDP shots off letter to EC, PM | |
Activists protest in Jammu, 4 injured
Early Times Report
Jammu, Apr 25: Not ready to take the Election Commission of India’s decision lying down, the Peoples Democratic Party has entered into aggressive agitation mode to protest rescinding of election notification for Hazratbal assembly constituency.
While the party President Mehbooba Mufti wrote to the Chief Election Commission and dashed a copy of protest letter to the Prime Minister’s Office, the party activists took to streets to oppose the decision. PDP is protesting against EC’s decision of withdrawing election notification for Hazratbal constituency which, the party alleges, is a favour to the ruling party candidate.
The assembly seat, which fell vacant after former chief minister and NC patron Dr Farooq Abdullah resigned on being elected to the Rajya Sabha, was scheduled to go to polls on May 7 along with Srinagar Lok Sabha constituency. However, during scrutiny of the nomination forms Dr Kamal was found short of requisite formalities, though he was later given a clean chit by the Returning Officer.
In Jammu, number of PDP leaders and workers assembled at Party Headquarter, here on Monday, and staged a protest demonstration.
Raising anti-government slogans and holding banners, the protestors marched towards the National Highway and staged a sit in. The vehicular movement along the highway was completed disrupted forcing the police to forcibly evict the protestors.
The PDP leaders later marched up to the office of Chief Electoral Officer, Jammu and Kashmir, and held demonstration there.
Back in Srinagar, the party president Mehbooba Mufti shoots a letter to the Election Commission drawing its attention towards “subversion of electoral process by the state government with the objective of helping the ruling party candidates”. “We have been cautioning against its impact on a place that is struggling with the consequences of the misdeeds of same coalition in its previous Avtar”.
Expressing satisfaction over the fact that the ECI took due notice of the “malpractice and manipulation by the State Government in having accepted the nomination papers of the ruling National Conference candidate Dr Mustafa Kamal”, the PDP president said that the party feels the action of the ECI in ordering cancellation of the election does in no way convey a sense of fairness or justice.
“You would kindly appreciate that the price for the wrongs committed in the process has ultimately to be borne by those who followed the procedure. The ruling candidate who took the basic requirements of filing the nominations with utmost casualness gets another chance to do his homework properly”.
In the process, the letter reads, the other contesting candidates who had not only filed nominations correctly but done much more, have been punished for none of their faults. “By the logic of ECI action, they would have been better off living with the fraud and not having pointed it out at all”.
“Other candidates including the one fielded by PDP have obviously invested a great deal of time, energy, effort and resources in building up their campaign. No one should know better than the Commission the scale and perception of threats faced by political workers and especially the candidates in J&K. Fighting elections here is more than a mere political outing as it involves matters of life and death. But, I am afraid the ECI has not taken these factors into consideration and in the process the ruling Party in the State has got some bonus for doing what it did”.
The PDP president cautioned that the `vitiation’ of the election process detected in Hazratbal constituency could prove contagious as none of the “perpetrators has even to feel sorry for their misdeeds not to speak of facing any action”. “Vitiation of electoral process in Kashmir, I hardly need recall has always had a disastrous fallout. And Hazratbal may not seem to the ordinary voter here as an aberration of local nature. The unfortunate history of elections here has not only devastated a few generations of residents of the state but also continues to hold hostage the interests of a large region around us”.
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