Srinagar, Oct 14 (KNO): National Conference (NC) has once again retained Srinagar—the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir in the recently conducted assembly elections by winning all the seats wherever the candidate was announced by the party. The party has bagged seven out of eight segments, making a clean sweep from the district.
As per the news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO), except the Eidgah candidate, Mubarak Gul, none of the candidates had a close call in the assembly elections. Gul won the seat by a margin of 1680 votes only.
However, the top three candidates, who won the elections with the greatest margin include Tanvir Sadiq with 16,173 votes from Zadibal constituency, Ahsan Pardesi with 11,343 votes from Lal Chowk constituency and Salman Sagar with 10,295 votes from Hazratbal.
The other three candidates from Habba Kadal, Channapora and Khanyar won by a margin of 9,538, 5,688 and 9,912 votes respectively.
The eighth seat—Central-Shalteng was won by alliance candidate and JKPCC President Tariq Hameed Karra by a margin of 14,395 Central-Shalteng.
The analysts are of the opinion that the most crucial seat won by the NC candidate was Lal Chowk segment due to multiple reasons.
Lal Chowk was the only seat across Kashmir where the Prime Minister Narendra Modi campaigned for the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) candidate, Er Aijaz Ahmad.
“The areas of four assembly segments were included in it during the delimitation exercise including Batamaloo, Sonwar and Chadoora. It was a difficult terrain for every candidate, but mostly for NC’s Ahsan Pardesi, who had a rival from Apni Party—Muhammad Ashraf who defeated former chief minister Omar Abdullah in the previous 2014 assembly polls,” the analysts said.
They added that other than Lal Chowk, Zadibal and Channapora were also the challenge for everyone in the fray where the NC candidates had tough and already winning candidates in the fray, who had a base in their constituencies—(KNO)