Farooq Abdullah to chair all-party meeting over J&K electoral roll revision

Chief electoral officer Hirdesh Kumar Singh on Wednesday last said people ordinarily residing in the region including migrant workers, businesspersons, students, and armed forces personnel will be allowed to vote

Former Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) chief minister Farooq Abdullah will on Monday chair an all-party meeting in Srinagar over the controversial revision of the electoral roll ahead of the first assembly elections post the revocation of the region’s semi-autonomous status in 2019.

Farooq Abdullah. (PTI)

People aware of the matter said that Abdullah has invited leaders of all major political parties except the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the meeting.

Chief electoral officer Hirdesh Kumar Singh on Wednesday last said people ordinarily residing in the region including migrant workers, businesspersons, students, and armed forces personnel will be allowed to vote. He added around 2.5 million new voters were as a result expected to be enrolled following a special revision of the roll.

The comments provoked outrage with former chief minister Mehbooba Mufti accusing the BJP of “bringing voters from back-door to install a fascist” as part of an attempt to change J&K’s demography. She called it the final nail in the coffin of electoral democracy and asked Abdullah to call an all-party meeting to decide the next course of action. She alleged half of the rigging and gerrymandering was done through a delimitation process of redrawing constituencies ahead of the assembly polls.

The assembly elections are likely to be delayed and could happen only in 2023 with a delay in the publication of the final electoral roll by a month. In May, a Delimitation Commission submitted its final report, paving the way for assembly polls.

J&K has been without an elected government since the BJP withdrew its support to Mufti’s People’s Democratic Party-led ruling coalition in June 2018.

Former minister and People’s Conference chief Sajad Lone, who quit a grouping of major political parties formed after changes to the region’s constitutional status in 2019, said he would not attend the meeting. He added they will protest in Delhi if outsiders are allowed to vote. “The government has come up with a clarification on this issue. Neither we accept nor reject the clarification.”

Altaf Bukhari, the chief of the newly-formed Apni Party, said he has spoken to Abdullah. “It will be known to everybody whether we will be attending the meeting or not.”

The J&K government issued a statement on Saturday clarifying that the revision of the electoral roll will cover existing residents of the region and dismissed objections to it as a “misrepresentation of facts”.