Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister and Vice President of the National Conference Omar Abdullah will be locking horns with the Chairman of the Peoples’ Conference Sajad Lone from North Kashmir’s Baramulla Lok Sabha seat.
Omar will be taking the Lok Sabha route after a gap of 20 long years. After the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019, the NC vice president announced he would not contest assembly elections unless J-K’s statehood was restored.
Earlier, Omar contested and won the Lok Sabha polls from Srinagar constituency in 2004.
The PDP, which stood at a distant fourth place in the 2019 elections, has fielded former Rajya Sabha MP Fayaz Mir.
Along with Omar the National Conference has fielded Shia leader Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi from central Kashmir’s Srinagar constituency.
Srinagar goes to polls on May 13 while voting in Baramulla will be held on May 20
Speaking to reporters in Srinagar after the announcement of his candidature Omar Abdullah said, “This time, our fight is not against any individual. In North Kashmir, my fight is not against any candidate, my fight is with those powers that are behind that candidate”. “It has been decided that I will be contesting from North Kashmir because BJP is focusing a lot on North Kashmir. I want these powers to be defeated in North Kashmir”.
Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency was redrawn in the delimitation exercise, undertaken after the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019, to include two assembly seats of Budgam district — Budgam and Beerwah — both Shia dominated, and one each new assembly segment in Baramulla and Kupwara.
Before delimitation, the Lok Sabha seat remained a strong bastion of the National Conference. The party has won the seat ten times since 1957. The Congress has won four times and the PDP once.
In the last general elections in 2019, NC candidate Mohammad Akbar Lone secured 133,426, defeating his nearest rival Raja Aijaz Ali of the Peoples Conference who polled 1,03,193 votes.
Independent candidate Sheikh Abdul Rashid polled 1,02,168 votes to grab the third spot, while the PDP candidate Abdul Qayoom Wani with 53,530 votes stood at number four.
Rashid, who contested the last elections but is under NIA custody on terror-funding charges, influences the Langate assembly segment of the constituency which he represented in the erstwhile J-K legislature twice.
