Will BJP, PDP join hands to keep NC, Cong out of Rajya Sabha? ......... Jammu : Will the BJP and the PDP join hands during the Rajya Sabha elections, scheduled to be held on February 7, to inflict defeat on the Congress and the NC and win all the four seats? If reports from New Delhi are any indication, then it can be said that it is extremely likely that both the BJP and the PDP, which share between them 53 seats and can also cultivate the Peoples Conference (PC), which has two MLAs, and a couple of other independent MLAs, particularly from Jammu and Kargil, would join hands to make a clean sweep. Reports from New Delhi suggest that senior BJP leader and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and PDP leader Haseeb Drabu had held a series of talks to stitch an alliance to form the next government in the state. Things would become clear on February 7 because the voting is not secret. The Rajya Sabha election will show who voted for who. There will be and cannot be cross-voting this time, as the rules have been changed to avert the possibility of cross-voting, as it happened in the past in J&K. Right now, the NC and the Congress have two members each in the Rajya Sabha and their term would come to an end between February 12 and February 15. The Congress members of the Rajya Sabha are JKPCC chief Saif-ud-Din Soz and Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad and the NC members of Rajya Sabha are Mohammad Shafi Uri, who didnt play any role whatever in the Upper House, and Ghulam Nabi Wani (Ratanpuri), who is close to pro-Pakistan separatist Syed Ali Shah Geelani. The political future of Azad and Soz is very much at stake. There is no possibility of any of them being fielded from a state other than J&K, but the problem is that the Congress, like the NC, does not have the required numbers in the state. The Congress has just 12 MLA and the NC only 15 and no party would be able to win a single seat in case they decide to go alone in the Rajya Sabha election. Since the relations between the NC and the Congress, especially between Azad and NC working president and former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, are far from cordial, it is difficult to say that they would be able to fight the election together. They can win one seat in case they contest the election jointly. But the question is: Why should the NC support the Congress candidate and the vice-versa.? Each party would try to ensure the victory of its own candidate. As for the PDP and the BJP, they would see to it that the NC and the Congress candidates are defeated. Their view is that since the people of the state decimated the ruling coalition comprising the NC and the Congress, it would be against the sprit of the 2014 mandate in case the elected MLAs of the PDP, the BJP and independent MLAs voted either for the NC or the candidate. It is important to note that people of the state had inflicted a crushing defeat both on the NC and the Congress and voted overwhelmingly for the BJP candidates in the Lok Sabha election in Jammu and Ladakh and for the PDP candidates in the Kashmir Valley. The BJP and the PDP had won three seats each and created a history of sorts by ensuring a comprehensive defeat of the NC and the Congress candidates. There are reasons to believe that both the PDP and the BJP would respect the 2014 Lok Sabha verdict in the state and act accordingly in the Scheduled Rajya Sabha election. Indeed, the NC and the Congress are in trouble.
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 04:46:14 +0000
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