National Conference (NC) president and former chief minister Farooq Abdullah said on Wednesday that his party will not form alliances in the upcoming Assembly elections.
"No, there wouldn't be any alliance," Abdullah told reporters. His statement makes it clear that the NC will not join forces with any party, including the INDIA bloc, particularly the Congress, with which it had allied for the Lok Sabha polls.
In the Lok Sabha elections, the NC and the Congress supported each other. The NC fielded candidates in three seats in Kashmir, including Anantnag-Rajouri, and the Congress on two seats in the Jammu region. The NC won two seats in Kashmir—Srinagar and Anantnag-Rajouri—but lost the Baramulla Parliamentary constituency to the jailed leader of the Awami Itehad Party, Abdul Rashid Sheikh, better known as Engineer Rashid. Rashid defeated Omar Abdullah by a margin of more than 1.5 lakh votes.
The NC had refused to agree to a seat-sharing arrangement with the PDP, forcing the latter to put up candidates on all three seats in Kashmir.
The NC’s decision to go solo in the Assembly polls comes a day before the Election Commission of India (ECI) begins a three-day visit to Jammu and Kashmir to decide on holding Assembly elections in the Union Territory. Elections in J&K were last held in 2014, bringing to power a coalition government of the BJP and the PDP, which collapsed in June 2018, leading to direct central rule and the abrogation of Article 370 on August 5, 2019, by the BJP government.
The NC’s decision to contest without allying with any party will impact the election results. Observers believe the BJP stands to gain if the regional parties fail to put up a joint front against the party, especially in Jammu’s Muslim-majority areas. A division of votes in Muslim-majority areas will benefit the BJP, which led in 29 of the 34 seats in the two Lok Sabha constituencies of Jammu and Udhampur.
