In a significant blow to the National Conference (NC) in Ladakh, the party’s entire Kargil unit announced their resignation on Monday.
The move comes as a protest against the party leadership allegedly pressuring them to support the Congress candidate from the Ladakh Lok Sabha seat as part of the INDIA bloc’s seat-sharing agreement.
NC Additional General Secretary Ladakh and former Jammu and Kashmir minister Qamar Ali Akhoon conveyed the unit’s decision to party president Farooq Abdullah in a letter. According to the seat-sharing agreement between the NC and Congress under the INDIA bloc, the Ladakh seat was allocated to the Congress.
Addressing reporters, Akhoon stated that the NC high command was pressuring them to extend support to Tsering Namgyal, the official Congress candidate from Ladakh. However, this move was against the decision taken by the Kargil Democratic Alliance (KDA), which has fielded Haji Haneefa Jan as its candidate.
Jan, the Kargil district president of the NC, has the backing of the Congress’s entire Kargil unit and was the unanimous choice to fight the Lok Sabha elections as an independent. In a related development, two independent candidates, Sajjad Hussain and Kacho Mohd Feroz, withdrew their candidature in support of Jan on the last day for withdrawal, setting the stage for a triangular contest on the seat where the BJP has fielded Tashi Gyalon, the Chief Executive Councillor-cum-Chairman of the Ladakh Autonomous Civil Development Council (Leh).
Jan also enjoys the backing of powerful religious schools and is seen as a serious contender in the race. Akhoon stated that they had taken the decision to resign from the basic membership of the NC in the larger interest of Ladakh, especially the Kargil region. He said, “Jan is the united choice of KDA, and we thank both the independents who withdrew in his support. The party high command was putting pressure on us to support Congress party’s official candidate. They were telephoning me, and I told them ‘never’. We made the sacrifice in the larger interest of Ladakh, especially Kargil.”
Jan had already submitted his resignation from the NC, and Akhoon said, “We are resigning from the basic membership of the party and disassociating with it.” The Ladakh Lok Sabha constituency, which is the largest in the country in terms of geographical expanse, is going to polls in the fifth phase of elections on May 20.
