Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti has committed to the Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh that her government would kick-start the process to hold the much-delayed panchayat elections from December 1.
Mehbooba told the Home Minister that she would be undertaking the exercise of restoring the exercise in a quite earnest way and that there would be no further delay in holding of the panchayat elections.
The Chief Minister made this commitment during her meeting with the Home Minister on October 26, when she was asked specifically as to when the panchayat elections would be held in the state because that was harming the interest of the grassroots democracy and depriving the rural people of the development that they deserve.
The last panchayat elections were held in April 2011 under the Omar Abdullah government, belying all fears as the voter turnout was more than 80 per cent across the state. That was a crowning success for the then NC-Congress government after the devastating year of 2010, when 120 youth were killed in street clashes. The PDP-BJP government though listed the grassroots democracy as a priority, but it failed to take even a baby step towards holding of the panchayat elections.
J&K is also waiting for the Urban and Local Bodies elections since 2010 – as the last polls were held in 2005 under the Mufti Mohammad Sayeed government with a grand success. The tourist season is cited as a reason for not holding elections in the spring-summer of Kashmir, but the tourist season has seen quite a dip since 2010. The tourists had returned in large numbers in 2014, but the floods undid that for the next two years and in 2016, the things were never on mind of the government and the hell broke loose following the killing of the militant commander Burhan Wani in July last year.
Panchayat polls from Dec 1, Mehbooba Mufti tells Rajnath Singh
