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| Heavy polling in Poonch, Rajouri, Kargil upset applecart of Kashmiri leaders | | Civic polls | | Early Times Report
Jammu, Oct 8: Kashmir-based parties, including NC and PDP, last month sprung a surprise by announcing boycott of the upcoming ULB elections. A number of statements, coupled with threats, were made by Farooq Abdullah, Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, to explain why they decided to boycott the upcoming polls. The Governor asked them to reconsider their decision and make the ongoing democratic exercise at the grassroots level a grand success, but with no result.
The Kashmiri leaders stuck to their stand saying they had no other option but to boycott the polls as the concerned authorities had failed to allay their fears regarding Article 35-A that granted the solitary state of J&K the absolute right to give or not to give citizenship rights to an individual or a group of individuals not permanent residents of J&K. They had perhaps hoped that their decision would have its impact not only in Kashmir but also in Jammu province and Ladakh region which house a substantial chunk of the people who constituted the state's majority community. They always considered Rajouri, Poonch and the erstwhile Doda district and Kargil district in Ladakh as their pocket borough on the ground that bulk of population in these districts belonged to the majority community.
During the first phase on Monday, the people of Rajouri, Poonch and Kargil showed the Kashmiri leaders a mirror and participated in the ULB polls on an unprecedented scale in all the wards, without any exception. Almost 80 per cent electorate in these districts exercised their franchise and reposed full faith in the country's democratic processes. The people of these districts made it loud and clear that they stood for development and not for the politics of boycott. In Poonch and Rajouri, several candidates took the plunge as independents. Some belonged to the PDP and some to the NC. So much so, in Poonch, senior PDP leader and MLC actively campaigned for independent candidates with the BJP feeling the heat and trying its best to neutralize his influence. In Rajouri, Nowshehra, Sunderbani and Kalakot too, many showed a thumb to PDP and NC and tested political waters.
Indeed, the PDP and the NC leadership committed a grave political blunder for which they will have to pay a very heavy price. The manner in which the people voted has only established that Kashmiri leaders have not only become irrelevant in Jammu, but also in Kashmir, where the overall polling percentage is just negligible with districts like Srinagar and Anantnag witnessing as low percentage of polling as 6 to 8 percent. |
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