Engineer Rashid’s brother’s narrow win shows NC has been able to send the message that he is connected with Centre.
New Delhi: Prominent leaders in Kashmir, Sajad Lone, heading the People’s Conference, and Khursheed Ahmad Sheikh, the brother of Engineer Rashid from AIP, won the assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir by a narrow margin. The chief of the Apni Party, Altaf Bukhari, lost the polls by a significant margin of 5,688 votes, reflecting the low voter turnout in the Chanapora assembly constituency.
A political analyst said, “The narrow victory margin of Engineer Rashid’s brother suggests how the cadre of National Conference (NC) successfully established the notion among people of his ties with the Centre. After Rashid was out on bail, there was a wave in his favour making the analysts believe that he would at least pull victory on six seats. But he could only win his seat of Langate, that too with the margin of just 1,602 votes.”
Lone, in one of his interviews with a leading media outlet, confessed, “This is the new Sajad Lone who will represent Kashmir.” There was an idea floated indirectly that the old Lone was working in association with the BJP. According to a leader from PC, “There was already an undercurrent in the region that would not have favoured Lone electorally, and the same thing happened. The elections had become bipolar between NC and the BJP, and all other parties were seen as proxies. It was a difficult seat for him to win, but he won it nonetheless.” Lone won the Handwara constituency by 662 votes against the NC candidate, Chaudhary Mohammad Ramzan.
According to party insiders in the National Conference, “The NC-Congress alliance was solidly being seen as an anti-BJP bloc by the people, and therefore the alliance stood on its narrative. It did not alter anything to match up to the soft separatism narrative pronounced by Engineer Rashid.” A party insider added, “At the same time, NC worked on the ground to sensitize people about the release of Rashid during the elections, and therefore people believed that something was fishy and went en bloc towards the NC-Congress alliance.” Interestingly, Altaf Bukhari had publicly announced some time ago that he was directly supporting BJP figurehead Narendra Modi, which had sent a wrong message among the masses in the Kashmir Valley. A political observer based in Kashmir said, “He could have competed if he had not uttered that statement. Kashmir has anti-BJP votes, and he endorsed the BJP openly. Therefore, he was elbowed out by the voting populace. The point here is that Bukhari is not a politician; he is more of a businessman, and he doesn’t understand how to get votes on his own. Now his party is at its lowest. It could also cease to emerge because people have rejected him, and no leader would want to associate himself with a leader who is rejected by the people.”
A shopkeeper in Bukhari’s constituency said, “People received with open arms whatever Bukhari had to offer; they also listened to him when he spoke to them but did not vote for him, and in the future as well, there is very little probability that they will vote him back to power.”