Srinagar: A Delhi court’s move to grant bail to Engineer Rashid, the Lok Sabha MP from north Kashmir, is likely to fire up his party’s electoral campaign ahead of the assembly election in Jammu and Kashmir.
Rashid, who has been languishing in New Delhi’s Tihar jail on terror funding charges, was granted interim bail on Tuesday (September 10) by Delhi’s Patiala House courts when the assembly elections, which are being held after a decade, are scheduled to commence in J&K.
The firebrand leader of the Awami Ittehad Party (AIP) and two-time MLA from north Kashmir’s Langate constituency had moved the court for interim bail in order to campaign for his party’s candidates ahead of the assembly elections, which are scheduled to be held in three phases on September 18, September 25 and October 1.
The court allowed his petition and granted him bail till October 2.
Although the AIP leader faces serious charges of terror funding, the interim bail granted to him by the Delhi court is likely to fan rumours that the AIP is a proxy of the BJP-led Union government and that its leader had “struck a deal” in exchange for his release from jail.
The party has, however, denied these rumours and accused its detractors of waging a defamation campaign against it.
After Rashid’s unlikely win from north Kashmir’s Baramulla constituency against former J&K chief minister and National Conference (NC) vice-president Omar Abdullah earlier this year, the AIP has grown steadily, with former Kashmir Chambers of Commerce and Industry chairman Sheikh Ashiq, a leading businessman from Srinagar, joining the party recently.
Rashid’s party is contesting the elections from about three dozen assembly seats, mostly in Kashmir. His young son, Abrar Rashid, has been leading the party’s election campaign.
While Ashiq has been fielded from the Ganderbal assembly constituency against the junior Abdullah, the Lok Sabha MP’s brother Khursheed Ahmad Sheikh, a government teacher who resigned from service, has been fielded from the Langate constituency.
Javed Hubbi, the son of former senior Hurriyat leader G.N. Hubbi, is also contesting on an AIP ticket from central Kashmir’s Chrari Sharief constituency.
Altaf Bhat, brother of top Hurriyat leader Peer Saifullah, is also contesting as an AIP candidate from the Rajpura assembly constituency.
The jailed separatist leader Nayeem Khan’s brother, as well as the brother of 2001 parliament attack convict Afzal Guru, are also in the polling fray as independent candidates.
Observers argue that the political winds blowing in J&K are part of the saffron party’s project to lead the government in the country’s only Muslim-majority region with the help of smaller players like Rashid, who is going to pop up on the electoral landscape in coming days after several independent candidates, including some from the Jamaat-e-Islami, and those from other smaller parties.
They believe that if the gamble pays off, the saffron party will project the new electoral equation in Kashmir as the mainstreaming of separatist ideologies that have been propagated more recently by Rashid’s party – which has called for granting the people of Kashmir the right to self-determination – and earlier by the Jamaat-e-Islami, which called for implementing the UN resolution on Kashmir.
Rashid’s appearance in Kashmir’s charged electoral landscape in time for campaigning is likely to give jitters to traditional mainstream outfits such as the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) and the NC, whose leadership has been cornered by the Union government in the aftermath of the reading down of Article 370.
PDP chief and former J&K chief minister Mehbooba Mufti – whose two young leaders Raja Waheed from Shopian and Harbaksh Singh from Tral joined the AIP recently – labelled Rashid as a “proxy of the BJP” on Monday.
Mufti’s remarks came after her party’s candidate from south Kashmir’s Shopian assembly segment, Yawar Shafi Banday, was injured in an alleged attack by AIP workers.
The police later said that it had taken cognisance of the “scuffle” between the two parties but no case was registered.
Earlier, Abdullah, who suffered a comprehensive defeat at Rashid’s hands in the recently concluded Lok Sabha election, claimed that a conspiracy had been hatched against him by the BJP-led Union government.
“When I contested the [Lok Sabha] election from the Baramulla constituency, a candidate who was behind bars filed a nomination against me. This is a strange election. I knew that the leaders in Delhi didn’t like me. But now I have known that they hate me,” he said referring to Rashid during an election rally last week in central Kashmir’s Ganderbal.
