In Cabinet of 6, including Omar, meet the 3 faces from Jammu, 3 from Kashmir

The third minister from Jammu in the Cabinet is Javed Ahmed Rana, a Gujjar leader from Jammu’s Pir Panjal area.

The three Kashmir-based ministers are Omar himself, who won from Assembly seats Ganderbal and Budgam this time in Central Kashmir; Sakina Itoo, the woman face and an MLA from South Kashmir; and Javed Ahmad Dar, an MLA from North Kashmir.

Omar can still include three more ministers, given the upper limit of nine for the Cabinet in J&K, leaving scope for accommodating more interests.

Satish Sharma’s rivals in the Assembly election included the BJP’s Rajeev Sharma – who had won Chhamb in 2014 – and Congress J&K working president and former deputy chief minister Tara Chand.

Sharma’s win was huge as Tara Chand is the Congress’s Dalit face in the UT, and has been a three-term MLA from Chhamb.

Sharma also comes from pedigree, being the son of late Congress leader Madan Lal Sharma, who had been a two-term MP from the Jammu-Poonch constituency (2004 to 2014) and a three-term MLA (from Chhamb, 1983 to 1987, and Akhnoor, 2002-2004).

Satish Sharma’s uncle Sham Lal Sharma is a BJP MLA from Jammu North.

Javed Ahmed Rana is considered the architect of the NC’s remarkable turnaround in Pir Panjal – comprising the Rajouri and Poonch districts – winning six of its eight Assembly seats this time. In 2014, the party had won just one, Mendhar, of the seven Assembly seats in Pir Panjal then. Incidentally, Rana was that sole winner, defeating the PDP’s Mohammad Mahroof Khan.

Rana, 61, a law graduate from Jammu University, is now a three-time MLA from Mendhar and served a stint in the middle as an MLC. He won from Mendhar this time defeating the BJP’s Murtaza Ahmad Khan by 17,270 votes.

The BJP ended up winning only one seat in Pir Panjal, the new seat of Kalakote added to it after delimitation. In 2014, it had won two seats in the region.

Sakina Itoo, 52, has been the NC’s woman face for a long time, and served in the Omar Abdullah government of 2008-14 as the Social Welfare Minister. She joined politics, abandoning her MBBS course in the third year, after her father Wali Mohammad Itoo was assassinated by militants in 1994.

The senior Itoo was an NC leader and represented the constituency Sakina won from this time, D H Pora (called Noorabad before delimitation in 2022) in South Kashmir’s Kulgam, for four consecutive terms from 1972 to 1987.

Sakina was first elected from the seat in 1996. In 2002, she lost to the PDP’s Abdul Aziz Zargar after she abandoned her election campaign following four assassination attempts on her. Six years later (the J&K Assembly term used to be six years earlier) she won by defeating Zargar and was inducted into the Cabinet. In 2014, Sakina lost again, to the PDP’s Abdul Majeed Padder, but wrested it back in the recent elections.

Javed Ahmad Dar won from the Rafiabad Assembly constituency in North Kashmir in the recent elections. Dar, 50, has an MBA from Pune University and joined politics in 1999 as a PDP leader. With the family name behind him, Dar’s rise was swift, and he soon became the PDP’s state secretary.

As per sources, Dar felt betrayed when the PDP did not give him a ticket. In 2008, he left and joined the NC, and after he won from the Rafiabad seat, was inducted in the Omar Abdullah-led Cabinet at the time.

In 2014 though, Dar lost to the PDP’s young face Yawar Mir. In recent years, he was the NC’s zonal president for north Kashmir.