Nearly 7 lakh voters are eligible to casting their ballot to decide the fates of 296 candidates in the fray for 43 constituencies going to polls on Saturday for the first-ever district council elections in Jammu and Kashmir since the abrogation of special status granted to the erstwhile state under Article 370.
The elections to fill up vacant seats of 1,088 sarpanchs and over 12,000 panch positions and Urban Local Bodies are also being held simultaneously. Forty-three sarpanch and 368 panch constituencies are going to the polls in the first phase on Saturday, according to The Indian Express.
In the Jammu division, 124 candidates, including 30 women, are contesting in 18 seats. In Kashmir, 172 candidates are contesting for 25 seats. There are 59 women candidates in the Valley.
Voting will conclude on December 19 and the counting of votes will be held on December 22. The results of panchayat bye-elections will be declared on the polling day itself.
Jammu and Kashmir Election Commissioner KK Sharma has said that polling will take place through Electronic Voting Machines, while postal ballots will be available for Covid-19 patients in isolation, senior citizens and physically unwell patients. West Pakistan Refugees, who are Indian citizens and are eligible to vote in Parliamentary elections, will also be entitled to exercise their right to vote for the first time, the election official said.
The Centre on October 17 amended the Jammu and Kashmir Panchayati Raj Act, 1989, for holding direct elections for DDCs, which will constitute the third-tier of the panchayati raj system.
Under the new rules, each district will be divided into 14 territorial constituencies by the respective deputy commissioners for electing their representatives, who will then among themselves elect the chairman and vice-chairman of these councils. The councils will replace District Development Boards, which when Jammu and Kashmir was a state, were chaired by a Cabinet minister or a minister of state and included MLAs, MLCs and MPs.
The BDC elections, held immediately after the reading down of Article 370, had failed to revive any political activity. Before the BDC elections, panchayat elections were conducted by the then governor Satya Pal Malik in November-December 2018, which also met with little success as more than 60% panch and sarpanch berths remained vacant in Kashmir.