The Election Commission on Wednesday declared polls to four Rajya Sabha seats from Jammu and Kashmir, to be conducted along with a bypoll to the Upper House from Punjab on October 24.
The previous members of these seats retired in 2021, three years after the Assembly of the undivided Jammu and Kashmir state was dissolved, and three years before the new Assembly of the Union Territory was elected. The vacancies coincided with three cycles of elections to the Rajya Sabha. These poll cycles were disrupted due to multiple impositions of President’s rule in Jammu and Kashmir.
The Rajya Sabha members included the People’s Democratic Party’s Mir Mohammad Fayaz and Nazir Ahmed Laway, BJP’s Shamsher Singh and Congress’s Ghulam Nabi Azad. Laway has since joined the People’s Conference, and Azad formed his own Democratic Progressive Azad Party.
Three separate elections will be held. One election for two seats, and one election each for the other two seats in accordance with the three original election cycles. The ruling National Conference-led alliance in the state has the edge.
Polls have been delayed for more than a year after the Assembly was elected. Earlier this year, the poll panel tried to convince the law ministry to stagger the polls to restore the original three cycles. The ministry reportedly refused to do so as there is no provision for this. The bypoll in Punjab is being held to fill the vacancy created after AAP’s Sanjeev Arora was elected to the Assembly in a bypoll in June.
Security upgrade
The poll panel is in the process of implementing e-signatures on its ECINet website and mobile app to allow applications, deletions and corrections only through Aadhaar-linked phone numbers. The move comes after the Congress highlighted large-scale machine-driven attempts to manipulate the Karnataka and Maharashtra voters’ list through mobile numbers of unknown people from outside the states.
Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi posted on X, addressing the chief election commissioner: “Gyanesh (Kumar) ji, we caught the theft and only then did you remember to put a lock — now we’ll catch the thieves too. So tell us, when are you going to give the evidence to CID?”