J&K People’s Conference chief and MLA Sajad Gani Lone said on Saturday that the National Conference (NC) “killed merit” by handing over seven votes to the BJP in yesterday’s Rajya Sabha elections for four vacant seats in the Union Territory (UT).
The NC won three seats, while one seat went to the BJP after the results were announced on Friday. On Saturday, Lone said his party will launch a “full-fledged campaign” against the ongoing reservation policy in Jammu and Kashmir.
“This government is out to kill merit. Open merit has been buried. We are going to start a ground-level registration drive against this policy,” Lone said, warning that the system “is pushing Kashmir towards a major disaster.”
He added that Kashmir has already witnessed enough “disempowerment over the past year” and threatened to launch hunger strikes, protests, and door-to-door campaigns if needed.
Lone said the NC itself was involved in cross-voting yet they accuse others of the same act they did themselves. He claimed that seven NC members “directly gifted their votes to the BJP.” “It was a fixed match,” Lone said.
“This is the same party that accused others of being with the BJP, and today they are sitting in the BJP’s lap,” he added.
He further accused the NC of denying Congress a rightful and deserving winnable Rajya Sabha seat. “They offered Congress a losing seat, number four. Omar Abdullah was asking, ‘Why don’t they contest for number four?’ They wanted it this way,” he said.
Regarding the abrogation of Article 370, Lone alleged that “midnight meetings” between Delhi and NC leaders before August 5, 2019, were full of “betrayal after betrayal.”
Lone said he was happy to abstain from the voting, as all fingers would have been directed towards him alone, he said.
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