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Union Home Minister Amit Shah may be headed to Srinagar Thursday for a two-day visit to Kashmir, during which he will meet the BJP leaders and delegations from the Pahari community, trade bodies and civil society.
Shah is also likely to chair a security review meeting during his overnight stay in the Valley.
Voting has been wrapped up in three of Jammu and Kashmir(J&K)’s five Lok Sabha seats. The BJP has not fielded its candidates for the three seats in Kashmir but has unofficially extended support to some of the new political parties formed there after the abrogation of Article 370.
Two Valley constituencies — Baramulla and Anantnag-Rajouri — are going to polls in the fifth phase and sixth phase on May 20 and May 25, respectively. Ladakh’s lone Lok Sabha seat will vote on May 20.
National Conference leader and ex-chief minister Omar Abdullah and People’s Conference president Sajad Gani Lone are in the fray in Baramulla. PDP chief and ex-CM Mehbooba Mufti is contesting from the Anantnag-Rajouri seat.
Earlier on Thursday, Shah will address rallies in Bihar’s Sitamarhi and Madhubani seats, which are going to polls on May 20.
Shah’s Kashmir visit comes a day after he made comments on the ongoing protests in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) at a BJP rally in West Bengal’s Hooghly district. While alleging that the Congress leaders were not in support of taking over PoK, he said, “Pakistan-occupied Kashmir is a part of India and we will take it back.”
After his release from Tihar Jail on May 10 on an interim bail granted by the Supreme Court, Delhi CM and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) supremo Arvind Kejriwal has led a renewed campaign for the Lok Sabha polls with a fresh strategy for the party. Kejriwal had been in the prison for nearly 50 days in connection with the Delhi excise policy case.
Following poll rallies and roadshows in Delhi and Haryana, Kejriwal is set to visit Punjab Thursday, for the first time since his release from Tihar Jail. The CM will first visit the Golden Temple in Amritsar before leading a roadshow in the city to campaign for the party’s Amritsar Lok Sabha candidate Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal. Kejriwal is expected to address several rallies in the state along with Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann.
With Punjab set to vote in the seventh and last phase on June 1, the state’s ruling AAP faces challenges from the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), BJP — and the Congress with which it was unable to arrive at a seat-sharing arrangement despite being members of the Opposition INDIA bloc and allies in Delhi, Haryana and Gujarat in the current Lok Sabha elections. With the SAD and the BJP also failing to revive their 25-year-long past association with an alliance for the ongoing polls, the state is set up for a four-cornered contest.
Kejriwal heads to Punjab just a day after campaigning for the Congress candidates in Delhi, where the AAP is contesting four seats and the Congress three. The results of the past Lok Sabha polls in Punjab show that an AAP-Congress alliance would have been a formidable force against the SAD and BJP. For instance, projecting the 2022 Assembly results onto the Lok Sabha seats shows that the two parties could have swept all the 13 Lok Sabha seats in the state based on their combined vote shares.
Earlier on Thursday, Kejriwal is also set to hold a press conference with Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav in Lucknow. It will be Kejriwal’s first press conference with a leader of the INDIA bloc since his release from jail. Akhilesh, notably, had attended the Opposition rally protesting Kejriwal’s arrest and the Centre’s alleged “misuse” of investigative agencies against the Opposition leaders.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, meanwhile, with a handful of states still to vote, has turned his focus on a state with a large chunk of seats voting in the remaining phases: Uttar Pradesh. On Thursday, Modi will campaign in Jaunpur, Bhadohi, Pratapgarh and Lalganj, all of which are bound for polls on May 25.
While Congress MP Rahul Gandhi has no events scheduled for Thursday, his sister and party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi will remain camped in their family’s traditional seats of Amethi and Rae Bareli in UP.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge will be leading the party’s charge with campaign events in Odisha’s Bhubaneswar and Kandhamal, which vote on May 20 and May 25, respectively.
Taking cognisance of post-poll violence in Andhra Pradesh, the Election Commission (EC) has summoned the state’s chief secretary and the director general of police Thursday to “personally explain” the administration’s failure to contain the incidents, sources said.
Post-poll violence was reported in parts of the state on Tuesday, where the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls were held simultaneously Monday. The leaders of the incumbent YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) and the principal Opposition Telugu Desam Party (TDP) have levelled allegations against each other over such incidents.
– With PTI inputs
