The results of the election for the 26 member Kargil’s Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council (LAHDC) have come as a severe jolt for the BJP that won only one seat despite the high-profile campaign.
It was an equally embarrassing position for the PDP that managed to get only two seats in the prestigious LAHDC.
The election has come as a shot in the arm of the National Conference (NC) and Congress that won 10 and 8 seats respectively despite the BJP sharing 6 seats with an influential Shia Muslim sitting MLA Bakir Rizvi in a bid to capture power in the cold desert region. The independents got 5 seats.
Counting of votes of the LAHDC that began on Friday was completed in the wee hours of Saturday. Polling was held on 27 August when out of the total electorate of 83844, 75 percent votes were cast. There were 99 candidates in the fray for the 26 seats.
The BJP has won the lone seat of Cha with a very thin margin of 30 votes although the Prime Minister Narendra Modi had recently laid foundation of the Rs.6809 crore Zojila tunnel project to provide round the year road connectivity to Kargil.
Expressing satisfaction over the performance of the NC, the party chief and MP Farooq Abdullah, while talking to this correspondent, thanked the electorate of Kargil and said that the “divide and rule policy of BJP” had failed to work there.
The NC would leave no stone unturned for development of Kargil, he added. Political observers believe that the Kargil LAHDC election might be a turning point as the BJP had for the first time won the Ladakh Lok Sabha seat in the last election although with a thin margin of votes.
The PDP and BJP that broke their alliance couple of days before polling for the LAHDC performed very badly in Kargil. A section of BJP was expressing satisfaction of having won the single seat to open its account in the Council.
The BJP that had lost the Shey-Thiksey seat of Leh’s LAHDC in the byelection for the seat earlier this year had aligned with the sitting MLA of Kargil district and other influential figures to capture the Kargil LAHDC.
A civil society group in Srinagar appealed to all political parties in Jammu and Kashmir on Saturday to boycott the upcoming local bodies and panchayat polls till the Supreme Court dismisses a petition challenging Article 35A of the Constitution.