Jammu and Kashmir polls: BJP's twist after candidate list causes internal backlash

The BJP's candidate list for the Jammu and Kashmir elections caused a fair bit of confusion and chaos on Monday. (File Photo: PTI)

The Bharatiya Janata Party on Monday released its second candidates list for the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly elections. The list had just one name, Choudhary Roshan Hussain Gujjar who will contest from the Kokernag Assembly constituency.

The second list came hours after confusion and chaos within the over the list of candidates. On Monday morning, the party released its first list of candidates with 44 names only to withdraw it minutes later. It later re-released a trimmed list with 15 names –this time, only for constituencies where polls are to be held in the first of the three-phase elections.

With the second list now out, the party has announced 15 candidates for elections to the 90-seat Jammu and Kashmir Assembly.

Backlash over Omissions?

While the party has remained tight-lipped over what led to the confusion this morning, a backlash over the omission of certain names may be one of the reasons that the party chose to withdraw the list first released this morning.

Some of the notable exclusions from the first list of 44 names were Ravinder Raina, president of Jammu and Kashmir BJP, and former deputy chief ministers Nirmal Singh and Kavinder Gupta.

The list, however, included Devendra Raina, the brother of Union minister Dr Jitendra Singh who switched from the National Conference. The list included the names of two Kashmiri Pandits and 14 Muslim candidates besides several former leaders of Congress, National Conference, PDP and Panthers Party, who joined the BJP.

However, some key omissions are believed to have caused resentment within the state unit of the BJP that led to the withdrawal of the first list, reports NDTV. It is this resentment that could have forced BJP to withdraw the first list for all three phases and re-release another one with only the names of candidates for the first phase.

BJP re-releases list with 15 names

Hours after withdrawing its first list of candidates, the party released a revised one with just 15 names. These names only correspond to the constituencies that are going to polls in the first of the three-phase elections. The list was announced after a meeting of the party's central election committee including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and party president JP Nadda.

Assembly polls in Jammu and Kashmir, the first since the abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir, are slated to be held in three phases on September 19, September 25 and October 1 while the results will be declared on October 4.

Three-cornered contest in Jammu and Kashmir

Jammu and Kashmir is set to witness a three-cornered contest between the BJP, PDP and the Congress- National Conference Alliance. In the elections held last in 2014, the PDP emerged as the single-largest party with 28 seats while the BJP bagged 25 seats.

The PDP and the BJP entered into an unlikely post-poll alliance and formed a government. The Congress and NC, on other hand, had shared power earlier but split ahead of the 2014 elections.

The two parties are still in the final stages of finalizing their seat-sharing arrangement for the upcoming polls. Congress leaders KC Venugopal and Salman Khurshid are in Srinagar where they are scheduled to meet the NC leadership to iron out the last-minute differences over certain seats.