Engineer Rashid’s brother faces PC challenge on home turf in Langate
Looking to follow Baramulla MP Engineer Abdul Rashid’s footsteps, his brother Khursheed Ahmad Sheikh has jumped in fray with the backing of AIP raising the stakes
The Langate assembly constituency in North Kashmir’s Kupwara district, which had among the highest turnout from the Valley in the Lok Sabha polls, will witness a high-stakes battle in the third phase of polling on October 01.
Looking to follow Baramulla MP Engineer Abdul Rashid’s footsteps, his brother Khursheed Ahmad Sheikh has jumped in fray with the backing of Awami Ittehad Party (AIP), raising the stakes. He takes on People Conference’s candidate Irfan Sultan Panditpuri, a DDC chairperson Kupwara and son of former MLA Mohammad Sultan Panditpuri.
Rashid represented the Langate from 2008 and 2014. His brother, a former teacher, resigned from his job to fight the elections. The seat, before Rashid’s entry, was a National Conference (NC) bastion as the party won every election between 1977 and 2008 barring the 1999 bypolls when Peoples Democratic Party’s Mohammad Sultan Panditpuri emerged victorious.
As many as 15 candidates are in fray including the NC-Congress alliance’s Irshad Ahmad Ganai, PDP’s Syed Ghulam Nabi Bukhari, Jamaat-e-Islami backed Kalimullah Lone. The last of them, the son of former Jamaat general secretary Ghulam Qadir Lone, is locked in a “friendly contest” with AIP, which otherwise has a tactical alliance with the Jamaat.
The contest, however, is being largely viewed as bipolar. “There will be a good contest between AIP and PC as the NC-Congress and PDP’s have little presence on the ground. Er Rashid’s charisma might be doing the trick for the party in his home constituency,” Tahir Majeed, advocate and social worker in Langate. said.
The Langate segment had polled the second highest number of votes (after Sonawari’s 78,500 votes) in the Valley in the recently held Lok Sabha polls with 76,819 votes. In the 2014 and 2008 assembly polls, the voting percentage stood at 72.52% and 61.34% respectively.
Er Rashid, while in jail since 2019 on terror funding charges, had defeated National Conference vice president Omar Abdullah and PC chief Sajad Gani Lone by huge margins to claim the Baramulla Lok Sabha seat. He took the lead in 14 of the 18 assembly segments. In Langate, as many as 40,226 people had voted for Rashid while 19,676 had gone to Sajad Lone and 9,925 to NC.
The soft-spoken Khursheed Ganai has hit the campaign trail and emerged as a popular pick. “He is cool and not aggressive unlike his brother, Er Rashid. But he also talks about the bigger issues of Kashmir, political prisoners,” a resident said.
Er Rashid’s aggressive stance against PM Narendra Modi, the BJP, the NC, the Congress and the PDP and stance on Article 370 after coming out of jail on interim bail have already created ripples in Kashmir’s political arena.
Former chief ministers Farooq and Omar Abdullah, Mehbooba Mufti and Sajad Lone have dubbed him and the AIP a “BJP proxy” and the attacks have only become more aggressive since its tactical alliance with Jamaat.
Lone in a recent press conference claimed Er Rashid’s release was a “badly executed plan of the Centre having the stench of BJP”. He charged that his party was under pressure from “certain forces” to grant “safe passage” to individuals in a segment of Kupwara. “We will not grant safe passage to anyone in Kupwara,” he said, flanked by the party’s Langate candidate Pandithpuri.
Refuting the view, Khursheed said, “In every constituency we are fighting aggressively against the BJP and those close to the,. This is propaganda [of the NC-Congress]. Here, everybody is called an agent. This culture should end when people are called proxies or agents.” He accused the traditional parties of seeing Jammu and Kashmir as their “fiefdom”.
Pandithpuri, meanwhile, has repeatedly spoken about the people’s “anger” on being “ditched” after the Lok Sabha polls. “People have been emotionally blackmailed. And they have now understood,” he said, raising the issue of road connectivity, water issues and the need for sports stadiums in the constituency.
“Our manifesto is for the dignity and development of youth. We want to empower youth. We want to turn Bungus( tourism place) into a source of employment. For the past 10 years there has been a web of bureaucracy in which a common man can’t work. My developmental works stood no chance in front of emotional politics,” he said while referring to his work as the DDC chairperson.
With 75 offbeat tourist destinations including Bungus being planned, Langate has been at the centre of the border tourism map.
The NC-Congress alliance candidate Irshad Ganai has been stressing on the development of Langate constituency. “People should be cautious of BJP-backed candidates appearing in different forms. Some individuals were exploiting voters without addressing their issues,” he said.
A political novice with Jamaat backing, Kalimullah Lone, who is a master’s in computer science, is also trying his luck from the constituency.
Hailing from Ananwan village in Langate, the 35-year-old is the son of former Jamaat general secretary Ghulam Qadir Lone who contested election as the joint candidate of Muslim United Front (MuF) in 1987. “Langate is facing several issues like lack of health infrastructure, education and other basic amenities. There is also growing drug menace in Kashmir which is not being discussed or addressed adequately,” he said.