NC will take part ‘in any elections’ held in J&K: Omar Abdullah

In 2018, the NC and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the two biggest Valley-based mainstream parties, had stayed away from the panchayat and urban local body polls, a decision that the NC had later regretted.

The elections had been held, after a gap of seven years, in the wake of the collapse of the PDP-BJP government and imposition of President’s rule. The NC and PDP had boycotted the polls citing the absence of an elected government, and said that they would rather focus their energies on the Assembly elections that were expected to happen soon.

Consequently, the November-December 2018 elections – for 316 blocks in 4,483 panchayat halqas (including Ladakh), comprising 35,029 panch constituencies – and November 2020 bypolls for over 12,000 seats were won by candidates backed by the BJP.

Meanwhile, in August 2019, the Centre abrogated Article 370, scrapped J&K’s special status and split it into two UTs. In the wake of the changes, the Assembly elections kept getting postponed, and are still to be held.

Now there are indications that elections to panchayats and urban local bodies in J&K will be held after their terms come to an end in November 2023, even as there is no sign of Assembly polls yet.

In December 2022, immediately after he was re-elected as NC president, Farooq Abdullah had termed the 2018 boycott “a huge mistake”, and directed party cadres, including son Omar, not to boycott any elections held in the UT in the future.

The argument was that the boycott had only ended up ceding space to the BJP and proved “counter productive” to addressal of concerns of the people of J&K.

Subsequently, the alliance formed by the NC and PDP along with other mainstream parties in the wake of August 2019 changes – the People’s Alliance for Gupkar Declaration – had contested the District Development Council elections, and secured a majority.

Omar hit back at Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s remarks in Jammu that AFSPA could be removed from parts of J&K after “permanent peace” is established. “While they (the BJP-led Central government) are in power, peace will not return,” the NC leader said.

He said areas where the government could have considered removing AFSPA before 2014, and areas that had become militancy-free, were also seeing a resurgence of militancy.