Srinagar: The second phase of the assembly election started in Jammu and Kashmir on Wednesday, September 25, with more than 25 lakh voters across six districts scheduled to exercise their franchise.
According to an official spokesperson, 3,502 polling stations have been set up in Ganderbal, Srinagar and Budgam districts of Kashmir division and Reasi, Rajouri and Poonch districts of Jammu division amid tight security arrangements with 239 candidates in the polling fray.
Among the top candidates in this phase of the election are former J&K chief minister Omar Abdullah, who is contesting from Budgam and Ganderbal constituencies, J&K Congress chief Tariq Hamid Karra, BJP’s J&K president Ravinder Raina and former J&K finance minister Abdul Rahim Rather among others.
The spokesperson said that the polling started at 7 am with long queues of enthusiastic voters waiting for their turn outside polling stations to exercise their franchise.
The first phase of the election was held on September 18 in Doda, Kishtwar and Ramban districts of Chenab Valley in Jammu division and Shopian, Anantnag, Kulgam and Pulwama districts of Kashmir Valley which recorded a massive turnout of 59 percent.
With the outlawed Jamaat-e-Islami fielding independent candidates from some constituencies in the ongoing elections, some pockets in south Kashmir, which had traditionally stayed away from polls after the eruption of armed insurgency in early 1990s, also voted in large numbers on the polling day.
According to political analysts, the Bhartiya Janta Party was hoping to keep the traditional parties such as the National Conference (NC) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) out of the next government in the country’s only Muslim majority region by returning to power with the help of smaller parties and independent candidates whose number has swelled in this election.
The saffron party ruled Jammu and Kashmir from 2015 to 2018 in an alliance with the PDP which ended on a bitter note in 2018 when the BJP pulled out the coalition government, bringing the erstwhile state under the central rule.
Following the intervention of the Supreme Court, the ongoing assembly election is being held in Jammu and Kashmir after a decade and it comes more than five years after the BJP-led union government read down Article 370 and bifurcated the erstwhile state into two union territories in 2019.
The issues of Article 370 and the restoration of J&K’s statehood besides jailing Kashmiris under anti-terror laws, surging unemployment and inflation in the union territory have dominated the election campaigns of the political parties.
According to analysts, the NC-Congress alliance is expected to emerge as the single largest bloc in Jammu and Kashmir but it could still fall short of a majority in the house of 90 members.
The BJP is also expected to come down from its tally of 25 seats that the party had bagged in 2014 assembly election in Jammu division, even though the 2022 delimitation commission increased the number of seats in Jammu by six while only one more seat was added to Kashmir Valley.
