April 18
Former chief minister and National Conference (NC) leader, Farooq Abdullah, is seeking re-election from Srinagar, a seat he won in a 2017 by-poll, in today’s second phase of the 2019 general election.
Abdullah, who won the seat when he defeated his nearest rival, People’s Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Nazir Ahmad Khan, by a margin of 10,766 votes, faces a triangular contest this time around. Challenging him are Irfan Ansari of the People’s Conference and Agha Mohsin of the PDP.
As per the Chief Electoral Officer’s website, there are over 29 lakh general electors in the two constituencies, out of which nearly 15.5 lakh are general male electors, over 14 lakh general female electors and 69 third gender electors. In addition to this, there are over 21 thousand service electors and 16.5 thousand persons with disabilities (PWD) electors in Phase II. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, there were over 26.5 lakh electors in these two constituencies. The number has now increased by nearly 2.84 lakh electors.
A total of 12 candidates are in the fray in Srinagar, which was won in 2014 by PDP candidate Tariq Hameed Karra, who quit the party in 2016 in protest against civilian killings. The Valley went through an intense phase of civil unrest after the killing of militant commander, Burhan Wani. Udhampur will also go to the polls on Thursday.
Twelve candidates are also in the fray in the constituency, but the contest is to be seen mainly between Jitendra Singh, minister of state in the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Congress’s Vikramaditya Singh, grandson of the erstwhile ruler of Jammu Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh.
In 2014, Jitendra Singh defeated the Congress’s Ghulam Nabi Azad by a margin of over 60,000 votes. The minister is also up against Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rebel and former minister Lal Singh, who twice won the Udhampur Lok Sabha seat on a Congress ticket.
Jammu Kashmir has a total of six Lok Sabha seats, two (Jammu and Baramulla) of which voted in the first phase on April 11.
Around 2.98 million voters will decide the fate of the 24 candidates who are in the fray in both Srinagar and Udhampur. More than 50,000 security force personnel will be deployed at 1,716 polling stations.