Terror funding accused and jailed MP Engineer Rashid’s presence in Kashmir to campaign for his Awami Ittehad Party (AIP) candidates is bound to give an interesting twist to the ongoing electioneering for the Assembly in Jammu and Kashmir.

The NIA court on Tuesday granted interim bail to Engineer Rashid in the midst of the ongoing campaign for the assembly election that is being held after a gap of ten years. The bail has been granted till 2 October which will let him campaign during all the three phases of the election. The AIP has fielded 26 candidates for the two phases.

Engineer Rashid has emerged as a new political entity in the Kashmir valley after he defeated the heavyweight former chief minister Omar Abdullah on north Kashmir’s Baramulla seat during the recent Lok Sabha elections which he contested from the Tihar jail.

However, his political strength is at stake in the assembly elections as Omar Abdullah and the PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti in particular have described him as a “proxy” of BJP.

Addressing an election rally in south Kashmir’s Pulwama today, Mehbooba alleged that “Engineer Rashid is being used to split the Kashmiri vote. While families of many Kashmiri prisoners are denied the right to meet their loved ones, candidates behind bars are being empowered during elections”.

She told media-persons on Monday that “the BJP’s proxies failed in the parliamentary elections, and now the centre has put jailed Rashid’s AIP on the forefront, along with other independents.”

Omar had recently said that attempts were being made to manipulate these elections by putting up independent candidates against him. From where were these candidates getting the funding to run the election campaign, he asked.

However, the Apni Party general secretary Mohammad Ashraf Mir said; “The nervous reactions by the NC and PDP leadership, first on Independent Candidates contesting elections and now terming Engineer Rashid’s AIP as BJP’s proxy show how insecure they are about any rising political alternatives in Kashmir. First they requested for his release, and now he’s a ‘proxy’. Their so-called long-standing dominance has done more to serve their interests than Kashmiris. Change is coming, and they can’t stop it”.

Rashid contested the Lok Sabha election as an Independent, and defeated Omar Abdullah by a margin of 2,04,142 votes. While Rashid got 4,72,481 votes, Omar secured 2,68,339 votes. Rashid was first elected to the Assembly from Langate in 2008 and re-elected in 2014.

He contested the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from Baramulla, finishing in third place.

Engineer Rashid was arrested in 2019 and charged by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), becoming the first mainstream politician to be booked under the stringent anti-terror law.

His arrest was in connection with the 2017 terror funding case in which the NIA detected his involvement during the investigation of a Kashmiri businessman Zahoor Watali who was arrested by the NIA on the charges of financing terrorist groups and Kashmiri separatists.

The names which the NIA included in its chargesheet included Yasin Malik and the Pakistan based top terrorist leaders and Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed, and Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin.