Jammu and Kashmir’s ruling National Conference has announced the party's J&K spokesperson, Imran Nabi Dar, as the candidate for the fourth vacant Rajya Sabha seat after talks with the Congress failed to reach a breakthrough. Last week, the NC had announced three candidates for the Rajya Sabha polls and said that discussions with the Congress were underway for the fourth. However, on Sunday evening, J&K Congress president Tariq Hameed Karra said the party had decided not to field a candidate for the seat since it was not one of the “safe seats” it had sought. “The core committee met to evaluate our experience as part of the ruling alliance over the past year. We have unanimously decided not to field our candidate for seat number four, since the safe seats that we had sought, number 1 and 2, have not been offered to us. So, we do not want to contest on seat number 4,” Karra said on Sunday. J&K Chief Minister and NC vice-president Omar Abdullah said on Monday that his party had kept one seat for Congress. However, “they have decided not to field their candidate. We felt that the best chances of winning that seat were with the Congress, and they felt otherwise, so be it,” he said. He termed the Rajya Sabha elections a true test of who is with the BJP and who is against it. He said that with 28 MLAs, the BJP “cannot win three RS seats without doing horse trading. They cannot even win one seat without horse trading.” While the NC has 41 members as the single largest party in the 90-member J&K House, it also has support from six Congress MLAs, one from the CPI(M) and four Independent legislators. “They need 30 (votes) for the fourth seat, and they have 28. There is not a single MLA, other than the 28 who are with the BJP, who has shown any support to the BJP over the last year. This means that if they are claiming they are going to win three seats, it is money power, muscle power and the power of agencies,” the Chief Minister said. He said, “This election will show us who the friends of the BJP are and who the opponents of the BJP are.” On October 10, NC general secretary Ali Mohammad Sagar announced the names of Chowdhary Mohammad Ramzan, Shammi Oberoi and Sajad Kitchloo as the party’s candidates. The party also announced that party president Farooq Abdullah would not be contesting the Rajya Sabha election. On Monday, Omar said it was Farooq’s own decision to step back.
