U.P ELECTION

While Srinagar constituency will go to polls on April 9, polling in Anantnag will be held on April 12. The Anantnag constituency had fallen vacant after Mehbooba Mufti became the chief minister last year. Nazir Ahmad Khan had been announced as the party’s candidate from Srinagar after senior leader and one of the PDP founders, Tariq Hameed Karra, left the party in protest after protracted violence in 2016 left at least 90 people dead in the Kashmir Valley.
The NC upped its ante the day the BJP announced that Adityanath would be UP chief minister. Former CM Omar Abdullah hit out at PDP president Mehbooba, expressing concern and anguish over the UP CM’s name. “Congratulations @MehboobaMufti. Your friends & allies have chosen a man who called for the dead bodies of Muslim women to be raped as CM,” Abdullah wrote on Twitter. “Do you still want to try and fool the people of Kashmir, especially those who trusted you in 2014, that a new Vajpayee-like era is starting,” he said in another tweet.

The PDP, which publicly has refrained from coming on record on UP, looks visibly hassled at the choice in the run-up to the election. Speaking to HT on condition of anonymity, a senior PDP leader said, “The party has to go to elections with the burden of 2016 unrest and Yogi Adityanath’s appointment. They (NC) are trying hard to utilise it.”
The leader, who admitted that the choice of chief minister “scared him”, says, ”The rise of Hindutva extremism is a reality and we need to engage with this reality,’’ justifying the alliance with the BJP.
While Mehbooba who, on one hand, is still trying to hard-sell the alliance with the BJP to people, maintains that only “Narendra Modi can heal the wounds of Kashmiri people’’, she has started talking about issues like the revocation of the controversial Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (ASFPA) to try and gain some lost ground in her core constituency. “We should not shy away from revocation of the AFSPA. When things improve, why not?” she said at an India Foundation counter-terrorism conference in New Delhi.
However, her brother Tasaduq, contesting from the restive Anantnag constituency, seems to have gauged the situation better. The junior Mufti, who formally joined the party in January, asked his party men to prioritise their “safety and not winning election”. “Your safety comes first...even if we don’t win, it doesn’t matter,” he told PDP workers at the first campaign meeting. PDP leaders had to reportedly face stone-pelting youth during a rally in south Kashmir.