With the Jammu and Kashmir elections being announced to be held in three phases, all eyes are on the political parties to come out with their respective candidate lists. Two individuals, whose similarity is simply uncanny, are likely to fight the election on a BJP ticket from Jammu. Both the individuals are senior police officers.
They both belong to the Scheduled Caste community, share the same name and are tipped to fight from two reserved seats, they both have asked for voluntary retirement.
While the 59-year-old Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) rank officer — a Kashmir Police Service (KPS) officer is Mohan Lal Kaith, the 58-year-old police officer is Mohan Lal.
Mohan Lal Kaith, who was heading the 4th Battalion of the security wing not so long ago is tipped to be fighting from Marh assembly constituency while a year junior, Mohan Lal, is tipped to fight from the Akhnoor assembly constituency — both of which are reserved seats.
Sources have indicated that they applied for VRS after multiple rounds of meetings with the BJP’s J&K leadership. Their applications have been awaiting Home Department clearance.
The Bharatiya Janata Party maintained its winning streak in Jammu for the third consecutive term, with Jugal Kishore Sharma and Jitendra Singh retaining their seats in the Lok Sabha election. While the BJP failed to field candidates in Kashmir, it even recorded a notable decline in its vote share in Udhampur and Jammu. The BJP’s allies in Kashmir — the Apni Party and the People’s Conference (PC) – also struggled, securing just 4 per cent and 3.3 per cent of votes, respectively. All together, the three parties received 16.4 lakh votes, or 31.7 per cent of the total votes. To put into context, the NC and the Congress-led coalition received a 41.6 per cent vote share. This dip in vote share weighs heavily on the BJP’s mind this time during the Assembly election.
No wonder, Mohan Lal and Mohan Lal Kaith come in here. They both have a reasonably clean record, a track record of being non-controversial and a warm bond with the people on the ground with their style of administration. The BJP stands to gain from it in the face of a dipping vote share even in BJP’s stronghold areas in J&K.
This will be the first Assembly election in J&K, ever since the contentious Articles 370 and 35A were abrogated on August 5, 2019, and Jammu and Kashmir was stripped of its statehood. The last Assembly election that J&K witnessed was in 2014 when the BJP had won a record 25 seats from the Jammu region when it formed a fragile government with the PDP, which ended with the BJP pulling the plug from the government in June 2018.
