Congress, CPM term plan to hold civic poll farcical

NEW DELHI: Congress on Monday said the government’s decision to hold block development council polls in J&K when all mainstream political leaders are in jail was a farcical exercise.
Former J&K chief minister and senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad held the current delimitation exercise inadequate and incomplete and accused the government of unilaterally deciding reservation of seats for SCs, STs and women without following the mandated procedure of setting up a delimitation committee in which all political parties must be represented.
“It is amazing that when leaders of all mainstream parties have been in jail for two months, the government unilaterally launched a delimitation exercise to which seats to reserve for who. Since BJP is the only party campaigning in the state right now, after fixing everything to their advantage, they have now announced elections,” Azad said. He also asserted that while the delimitation exercise sidelined all mainstream parties key to J&K politics, BJP, a relatively new entrant in Kashmir, was the only one that had been represented in the exercise, rendering it meaningless.
The CPM also referred to the announcement of BDC polls as a “travesty of democracy” and said the polls “will be nothing but a sham”.
Referring to the government’s desperate attempts to portray that everything in Kashmir was “normal” despite the unprecedented clampdown on communications.
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References

1. ^{^} Ghulam Nabi Azad (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
2. ^{^} communications (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)

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