National Conference (NC) on Saturday rejected delimitation commission’s draft proposals of adding six assembly seats in Jammu against one in Kashmir and redrawing the existing five Lok Sabha seats.

NC spokesman tweeted; “JKNC summarily REJECTS draft working paper made available by Delimitation Commission to associate members on February 4th, 2022. A detailed response will follow after the party has had time to discuss the implications of what has been proposed”.

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The commission in its draft report has rejected the NC’s arguments against increasing six Assembly seats in Jammu region as against just one in Kashmir division.

Once the delimitation exercise is completed, the number of Assembly seats in Jammu and Kashmir will go up from the existing 83 to 90.

Twenty-four seats of the Assembly are vacant for Pakistan-occupied Jammu Kashmir (PoJK). In the previous Assembly, Kashmir had 46 seats, Jammu 37 and Ladakh four.

However, Ladakh is a separate Union Territory after reorganization of J&K on 5 August 2019 when the state was split into two UTs.

The report was sent on Friday to the five associate members of the delimitation commission, Farooq Abdullah, Hasnain Masoodi and Mohammad Akbar Lone (NC MPs) and
Dr Jitendra Singh and Jugal Kishore (BJP MPs). They have been asked to submit their views by 14 February after which the report would be put in the public domain.

The commission is reported to have decided to redraw boundaries of five Lok Sabha constituencies by linking some segments of Rajouri and Poonch districts with south Kashmir’s Anantnag seat.

The commission headed by retired Supreme Court judge Justice Ranjana Desai and Chief Election Commissioner Sushil Chandra and state election commission KK Sharma as members was set up on 6 March 2020.

Other Kashmir centric political parties were also against adding six assembly seats in Jammu against one in Kashmir. On the other hand, people in Jammu, before setting up of the commission, were nursing a sense of discrimination in the number of assembly seats although the geographical area of Jammu was much larger than that of the Kashmir valley.