The Modi government tried to portray that it’s decision to abrogate Article 370 was received warmly in Jammu and Kashmir, but the outcome of the Block development Council elections, with the BJP winning only 81 of the 307 blocks, proves otherwise.
In contrast to it’s handsome show in the election to the six Lok Sabha seats of unified Jammu and Kashmir, the Bhartiya Janta Party was in for a rude shock in the Block development Council elections held in the divided Jammu and Kashmir on October 25. This despite the fact that the BJP claimed that it’s decision to abrogate the erstwhile State’s special status on August 5 was received warmly in the Jammu region, where predominantly Hindu population havens aspirations that are dissimilar to those of the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, which had been overwhelmed by three decades of militancy and is generally responsive to political idioms such as “autonomy” and “self rule”. In the BDC elections, 1,065 candidates were in the scare across 22 districts.
In the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP won the Jammu, Udhampur and Ladakh’s seat, the People’s Democratic Party(PDP) the Anantnag and the Baramullah seats , and the National Conference(NC) the Srinagar seat. The Ladakh region has since become a Union Territory. In Jammu, the BJP candidate, Jugal Kishore, retained the seat by trumping Raman Bhalla of the Congress by 3,02,875 votes and in Udhampur, Union Minister Jitendra Singh, the non-elective MP defeated the Congress Vikramaditya Singh by a margin of 3.5 lakh votes.