SRI NAGAR: Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) senior state leader and former deputy chief minister Kavinder Gupta said that his party has decided to contest the forthcoming Assembly elections in the State alone by not agreeing to a pre-poll alliance with any party. Gupta said that the BJP will contest all 87 assembly seats in the three regions of the state.
The three regions being Kashmir, Jammu and Ladakh have 46, 37 and four seats respectively. This decision means that the BJP will not forge an alliance with any of its former ally including Peoples Conference of Sajjad Lone. According to Gupta, the party’s mission in Assembly polls is to capture 44+ seats so as to form a majority. In the 2014 Assembly polls, the BJP had won 25 seats and all of them were from Jammu. It was for the first time that the BJP had won such number of seats from the state.
The BJP had later formed a coalition government with PDP which collapsed in June last year with the State now being under President’s rule. Another BJP leader said the party is looking forward to opening its account in Kashmir and Ladakh in the Assembly elections this time.“We have got a good presence in all parts of the Valley and Ladakh. People in both the regions have accepted BJP like any other mainstream party,” a senior BJP leader said.
The BJP in the 2019 parliamentary polls was leading from Trail Assembly segment in militancy-hit south Kashmir. The party was also leading in three out of four Assembly segments in Ladakh. The BJP won three out of six parliamentary seats in Jammu and Kashmir in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections will look to bank on the central government’s thrust on development to lure in voters.