NC’s polling share for Srinagar seat may look upward

Azhar Qadri

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, April 19

The voting pattern in the Srinagar constituency has revealed that the Assembly segments held by the National Conference (NC) have generated maximum votes.

The assessment of the Election Commission’s data by The Tribune has found that the Srinagar Assembly segment, represented by the NC, accounted for 45 per cent or 83,620 votes that were cast yesterday.

Of the 15 Assembly segments that make up the Srinagar constituency where polling was held yesterday, seven were represented by the NC in the last Assembly.

The PDP, which was the former ruling party, also had control of seven seats, but it lost three of these to defections and resignations, while one was represented by the chief of the PDF Hakim Yasin.

The Srinagar constituency had an electorate of 12.94 lakh, of which 14.1 per cent or 1.82 lakh people had cast their votes. The four Assembly segments, formerly represented by legislators loyal to the PDP, which fielded a little-known politician and a member of an influential Shia family Aga Mohsin as its candidate, accounted for 30 per cent or 56,505 votes.

Sources say the PDP’s vote share, however, is likely to dwindle as the party may suffer from strong anti-incumbency in the Valley for its alleged failure to deliver during the turbulent past years and its alliance with the BJP, which the party’s president and former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti had described as “suicidal”.

Among the four Assembly segments held previously by the PDP is Chrar-e-Sharif, which accounted for the highest voting among the 15 segments of Srinagar as 26,283 votes were cast. Chrar-e-Sharif, however, will be a close contest as the segment was won by the PDP in last Assembly but was previously represented by NC’s stalwart Abdul Rahim Rather for 37 consecutive years.

The remaining four Assembly segments account for 22.9 per cent or 41,938 votes.