BILKULONLINE
By Deepika Bhan
New Delhi, Oct 8: As the Abdullah family registered a big win in the J&K Assembly elections, other dynasties failed to garner electoral support. The worst day was for the Mufti dynasty which managed to win only three seats out of the 90 Assembly constituencies, and its, newest family member to enter politics also lost the election.
Mehbooba Mufti’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had secured 28 seats in 2014 when the last Assembly election was held. The party formed the government in Jammu and Kashmir in 2015 in an alliance with the BJP. The BJP, however, withdrew its support in 2018. But in the October 8 verdict, the people gave a thumbs down to the party. The PDP chief’s daughter, Iltija Mufti, lost her first Assembly polls from the Srigufwara-Bijbehara in South Kashmir, a seat which has been a PDP stronghold for the past few decades.
The Bijbehara Assembly seat, before delimitation, was previously represented by Iltija Muft’s grandfather and former Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed and her mother Mehbooba Mufti. Losing the seat is a major blow to the Muftis. If Mufti’s had a very bad day, another dynasty managed to keep the show on. Sajad Gani Lone of the Jammu & Kashmir People Conference won the Handwara seat, with a wafer-thin margin of just 622 votes.
He secured 29,812 votes and his nearest rival Chowdry Mohammad Ramzan of the National Conference got 29,150 votes, according to the Election Commission of India (ECI). However, he lost the Kupwara constituency by a significant margin of over 20,316 votes to PDP’s Mir Mohammad Fayaz. Lone, in fact, was third after Fayaz and NC’s Nasir Aslam Wani. In the 2014 Assembly elections, Lone defeated NC’s Ramzan by over 5,000 votes in Handwara and subsequently served as a minister in the PDP-BJP coalition government under Mufti Mohammad Sayeed. Sajad Lone’s father, Abdul Gani Lone, won the seat three times in a row in 1967, 1972 and 1977. He contested two elections as a Congress candidate and fought a third one as a Janata Party candidate. The star of the day, however, was the Abdullah family. Omar Abdullah won the Budgam and Ganderbal Assembly seats in Kashmir by big margins. He defeated PDP’s Aga Syed Muntazir Mehdi in Badgam with a margin of more than 18,485 votes. The NC vice president polled 36,010 votes in Budgam, one of the two constituencies he contested in the Jammu and Kashmir elections this time.
In Ganderbal, he defeated PDP candidate Bashir Ahmad Mir by a margin of 10,574 votes. Omar Abdullah polled 32,727 votes here. With this win, Omar Abdullah has reclaimed his electoral weight in the UT, especially in the valley. He lost the 2024 Lok Sabha elections from Baramulla which was won by Engineer Rashid. Perceiving the win in the Assembly elections when the early trends came in, his father, NC chief and Lok Sabha member, Farooq Abdullah announced that his son would become the Chief Minister. Omar Abdullah was the J&K CM from 2009 to 2015. His father, Farooq Abdullah and his grandfather Sheikh Mohd Abdullah also were the CMs. The win in the 2014 Assembly elections for Abdullahs reaffirms the dynasty’s hold in Kashmir politics.