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J&K polls: Congress' Ghulam Ahmed Mir wins from South Kashmir's Dooru segment
Ghulam Ahmed Mir was among those arrested by the CBI in the sex racket scandal that shook Kashmir in 2006; he was later acquitted in 2012.
Congress general secretary and former minister Ghulam Ahmad Mir won from South Kashmir's Dooru constituency in the assembly election, with results being announced on Tuesday, October 8. He won by 29,728 votes.
Initial trends showed that the 64-year-old politician's closest rival for the seat was Mir Mohammad Ashraf Malik of the Peoples Democratic Party, a retired district and sessions judge.
More details on Dooru
Dooru in Anantnag district was the first constituency in the Kashmir Valley to witness high-profile election campaigning, featuring prominent campaigners such as Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Kanhaiya Kumar, along with former Jammu and Kashmir chief ministers Farooq Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, all rallying for Mir.
In the last assembly election held in 2014, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate Syed Farooq Ahmad Andrabi won the seat by a narrow margin of just 161 votes.
Mir, who has previously served as the Congress president in Jammu and Kashmir and as tourism minister, has held the position of MLA for Dooru in two consecutive terms, in 2002 and 2008.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections for South Kashmir’s Anantnag constituency, both Mir and Mehbooba Mufti were defeated by Hasnain Masoodi of the National Conference.
Rahul Gandhi launched the Congress election campaign in Kashmir from the Dooru constituency on September 4, which went to polls in the first phase along with 23 other constituencies in the South Kashmir and Jammu region on September 18.
NC president Farooq Abdullah campaigned for Mir, sending a powerful message of coalition unity between the two parties. From 1962 to 1996, Dooru was a stronghold for the NC, which won the majority of elections from this constituency.
Mir contested the Assembly election from Dooru for the first time in 1996 but was defeated by JKNC's Ghulam Hassan Wani. He was among those arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation in the sex racket that rocked Kashmir in 2006 in which girls, including minors, were allegedly forced into prostitution, blackmailed and supplied to politicians, senior bureaucrats, top police officials and even surrendered militants.
However, a special CBI court — the Supreme Court had ordered transferring of the case to Chandigarh on the plea of accused who contended that no lawyer in Srinagar was willing to defend them — in September 2012 acquitted Mir and others in the scandal after all the prosecution witnesses turned hostile.
Mir was part of the faction loyal to veteran Congress leader Saifuddin Soz and was regarded as a staunch opponent of former Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad.
