New Delhi: Months after losing the contest for the Baramulla Lok Sabha seat to Engineer Rashid, National Conference (NC) vice president Omar Abdullah has won both assembly seats he contested, Budgam and Ganderbal, by sizeable margins. Both constituencies are regarded as bastions of the Abdullahs and the party in the Union territory of Jammu and Kashmir.
In Budgam, Omar has won by a margin of 18,485 votes against the PDP’s Aga Muntazir Mehdi.
Mehdi, the son of prominent Shia cleric and Hurriyat leader Aga Syed Hassan Mossavi, belongs to one of the three prominent Shia clergy families in the Valley. Shia votes are significant in the constituency. Mehdi was fielded by the Mehbooba Mufti-led party after his cousin, Aga Ruhullah, became an NC MP.
In Ganderbal, Omar received 32,727 votes, defeating his nearest rival, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)’s Bashir Ahmad Mir, by 10,574 votes. Jailed cleric Sarjan Barkati received only 438 votes.
Barkati was arrested on 1 October 2016 for his role in the protests after militant Burhan Wani’s death that year. His daughter, Sugra Barkati, had led an emotional campaign in support of her father, drawing large crowds.
Omar had said in early August that he wouldn’t contest the Jammu and Kashmir assembly elections till the region’s statehood was restored, but later announced that he would contest in two seats.
The campaigning was an uphill battle for the former chief minister, with both constituencies offering their share of challenges in his battle to reclaim prestige.
The Budgam assembly constituency falls under the Baramulla parliamentary seat—which Omar lost to AIP founder Engineer Abdul Rashid Sheikh by 204,142 votes—and has been a bastion of the NC, with the party managing to win it eight out of nine times. In 1972, the NC did not contest the elections.
In Ganderbal, the home turf of the Abdullahs, during the process of filing his nomination papers, the NC leader held out his cap in an appeal for votes, saying, in Kashmiri, “My honour is in your hands.”
His decision to contest from Ganderbal marks his return to the constituency, which he represented between 2008 and 2014 as the chief minister of the NC-Congress coalition government of the erstwhile state.
Later, in 2014, he won the Beerwah assembly seat in central Kashmir’s Budgam district and left the Ganderbal seat to his then-party colleague Ishfaq Jabbar.
In the past, Ganderbal has been represented by the three generations of the Abdullahs—NC founder Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, Farooq Abdullah and Omar. However, Omar lost the seat to the PDP when he contested his first election in 2002. He then went on to register a win in 2008 from Ganderbal but shifted to the Beerwah assembly seat in 2014.
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)
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