National Conference president Farooq Abdullah said on Thursday that a pre-poll alliance with the Congress party is certain for all 90 seats of the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) is also expected to join this alliance.
Abdullah’s remarks came after he and his son Omar Abdullah met Congress leaders Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi in Srinagar. Earlier in the day, Gandhi, while addressing party workers in Srinagar, said the alliance will be formed while maintaining the “respect of Congress workers”.
The three-phase assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir will begin with the first round of voting for 24 seats on September 18. The other two rounds are scheduled for September 25 and October 1. Counting of votes will take place on October 4.
Farooq Abdullah said on Thursday that the alliance would be finalised by the evening. However, the seat-sharing formula between the two parties has not been formally announced.
Hurdles in the way of seat sharing
As per the current situation, both the parties are working out some hurdles before finalising any formula. The NC has a strong presence in the Kashmir Valley, while the Congress is a big player in Jammu, where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is also a major player.
According to the report, the Congress party wants seats from the Kashmir Valley, from where it has fielded candidates in the previous elections. On the other hand, the National Conference is not ready to give up some of these seats, as it feels that it has been working on the ground level in these seats for a long time.
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Since the first assembly elections were held in Jammu and Kashmir in 1951, the National Conference (NC) and the Congress were the major parties in the erstwhile state, but in 2002, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) emerged as a major political player for the first time.
Congress and NC are part of the opposition Party of India at the national level. Both the parties contested the 2024 Lok Sabha elections together. NC fielded three candidates in the Valley seats, while Congress fielded two candidates in Jammu as part of a pre-poll agreement. NC won two seats in the Valley, but Congress failed to win any seat in the 2024 general elections.
The National Conference had won 28 seats in the 2008 assembly elections. It formed a coalition government with the Congress, which won 17 seats in the 87-member House, which also includes Ladakh. Ladakh became a separate union territory in 2019. The number of seats in Jammu and Kashmir was increased to 90 after delimitation in 2022.
seats in srinagar
Congress wants to contest at least 8 seats in Srinagar district. This includes seats like Hazratbal, which is considered a stronghold of NC. The party has already decided the name of the candidate from here.
The Farooq Abdullah-led party is also not keen on giving some seats to the Congress party in Pulwama and Anantnag districts of the Kashmir Valley.
For example, Anantnag’s Dooru seat was a National Conference stronghold from 1962 to 1996. In the 2002 and 2008 assembly elections, former state Congress chief Ghulam Ahmed Mir won the seat. In the 2014 elections, PDP’s Syed Farooq Andrabi won the seat.
The National Conference is set to give an edge to the Congress in the Jammu region, where the grand old party has a better presence than in the Kashmir Valley, where the National Conference thinks it is a major stakeholder.
The two parties are also discussing a ‘friendly’ contest on seats where consensus has not been reached yet.
