NC wins three seats, Mehbooba Mufti’s PDP wiped out.
Srinagar: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has not only retained its three Lok Sabha seats in Jammu and Kashmir, but has also emerged as the strongest party in terms of vote share. While the National Conference (NC) won three seats in Kashmir, Mehbooba Mufti’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was not able to open its account. With 46.2% of total votes in its favour, the BJP has surfaced as the largest political party in Muslim majority Jammu and Kashmir. In the 2014 Assembly elections, the BJP had emerged as the single largest party with 23% of vote share.
Senior party leaders in Jammu said that they were ready for the Assembly elections and expressed their willingness for early polls. State BJP president Ravinder Raina told this newspaper that given the support the BJP got in this election, there will be a BJP Chief Minister in the state after the Assembly elections.
Raina said that they were eagerly waiting for the Election Commission of India to announce the dates for the Assembly elections. He said that there is a BJP wave in the entire state as its candidates in Jammu and Ladakh have won by huge margins.
In Jammu and Ladakh regions, the BJP scored a win despite a gathbandhan between Congress and all the regional parties. Dr Jitendra Singh, who was a sitting MP from Udhampur, won the seat by over 3.5 lakh votes and similarly the sitting MP from the Jammu parliamentary segment, Jugal Kishore Sharma, won by a record margin of over 2.5 lakh votes.
In the Ladakh parliamentary segment, NC, PDP and other organisations had fielded a joint candidate against the BJP candidate J.T. Namgyal, but Namgyal won by over 10,000 votes. The state unit of BJP wants early Assembly polls as they are hopeful for a record win given the vote share they have achieved in the parliamentary elections.