Politics

BJP Revises J&K Candidate List, Releases Only 15 Names for First Phase

The BJP today released a list of 44 candidates for the three-phase election in Jammu and Kashmir, which sends 90 members to the Assembly. The list was later withdrawn. A revised list issued later in the day mentioned only 15 candidates for the first phase of the election; though these selections remained unchanged.

Few would have expected the list to miss out on the name of three big leaders of the erstwhile alliance of the party in Jammu and Kashmir region. This includes BJP president Ravinder Raina and former Deputy Chief Ministers Nirmal Singh and Kavinder Gupta.

Apart from them, one can also count Devendra Rana who joined the BJP from National Conference recently and happens to be the brother of Union Minister Dr. Jitendra Singh. The first list also contained two Kashmiri Pandits along with 14 Muslim candidates.

The list also fell within the list of deletions for several former leaders from Congress, the National Conference, PDP, and Panthers Party who had joined the BJP.

The party is believed to have withdrawn the three-phased list and reverted to only the first phase, trying to buy time as internal pushback and dissatisfaction with key omissions started festering.

The three-phase polls are scheduled for September 19, 25, and October 1 with votes counted and the results to be announced on October 4. This is also the first Assembly election since the region lost its special status in 2019 and was reorganised into two Union Territories.

The Central Election Committee of the BJP has finally cleared its candidates for the election in a key meeting in Delhi, which was attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, and BJP chief JP Nadda.

In 2014, the state of Jammu and Kashmir went for its last Assembly election. BJP had 25 and PDP was the largest political party with 28 seats, whereas the highest share went to the National Conference, managing 15 seats, and then Congress with 12.

This ensured that BJP and PDP could ally post-election and form the government. This alliance was an unexpected one, taken at the beginning by Mufti Mohammad Sayeed and later taken over by Ms Mehbooba Mufti after his death in 2016.

Therefore, it will become a straight fight between the BJP, PDP, and National Conference- Congress alliance. National Conference and Congress are yet to decide their seat-sharing formula.

Congress has sent its General Secretary in-charge of the state, Mr. KC Venugopal, and leader of the state Mr. Salman Khurshid to Srinagar to finalise rest of the negotiations.

Earlier, the president of the Congress, Mallikarjun Kharge, and Leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, had met the National Conference president, Farooq Abdullah, and vice president, Omar Abdullah, to announce their alliance.

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Reacting to this alliance, Tarun Chugh, BJP general secretary gifted with the task of overseeing the party campaign in J&K, while considering the alliance, tweeted it as the house of cards folding with the end of faces in defeat much like the way it had folded, collapsed, and lost during the assembly contour.