Jammu Kashmir Election Results 2024: Despite hype, Engineer Rashid, Jamaat fail to make an impact in J&K
Jammu Kashmir Assembly Election Results 2024: 'Strategic' alliance wins one seat; Rashid's brother the lone winner
Khurshid Ahmad Sheikh, Awami Ittehad Party candidate and brother of AIP chief Sheikh Abdul Rashid, shows the 'certificate of election' after his victory from Langate seat in the Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday. (Photo: PTI) J&K Election Results 2024: The banned Jamaat-e-Islami and Engineer Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party (AIP) – “strategic allies” who were expected to alter the poll dynamics in the Valley – failed to make an impact in the Jammu & Kashmir Assembly elections.
Their only success was in north Kashmir’s Langate, where Rashid’s brother Sheikh Khurshid won by a narrow margin of 1,602 votes against Irfan Panditpuri of the People’s Conference. Rashid has twice in the past won Langate, in 2008 and 2014, as an Independent candidate. Of the 36 AIP candidates, 31 forfeited their deposit, with nine of them securing less than 1,000 votes.
The AIP’s show is particularly dismal as it came barely four months after Rashid, while in jail, managed a spectacular win in the Lok Sabha elections from Baramulla – he had defeated NC leader and former chief minister Omar Abdullah and People’s Conference chief Sajad Lone. Rashid had then secured a lead in 15 of the 18 assembly segments that fall in the Baramulla Lok Sabha seat. However, throughout his campaign in the Assembly elections, Rashid stayed under a cloud of accusations by rival parties that he had been released on interim bail and deployed by the BJP to cut into the votes of the NC-Congress and PDP.
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