AAP opens account in J&K as it wrests Doda from BJP

Jammu, Oct 08: The Aam Aadmi Party, which came a cropper in the Haryana elections, has got some solace as it opened its account in Jammu and Kashmir for the first time.

The party's Mehraj Malik won the Doda seat in the Jammu region, defeating his nearest rival, Gajay Singh Rana of the Bharatiya Janata Party, by a margin of 4,470 votes.

While Malik had secured 22,944 votes, Rana was in second place with 18,174 votes, and Khalid Najib Suhrawardy of the National Conference was third with 12,975 votes. The rest of the candidates, including Abdul Majid Wani of Ghulam Nabi Azad's Democratic Progressive Azad Party, did not even reach the five-figure mark.

Congress candidate Sheikh Riaz Ahmed was lagging way back with just 4,087 votes.

The AAP has wrested the seat from the BJP, who had won the Muslim-majority seat in the 2014 polls, with Shakti Raj Parihar defeating sitting MLA Wani, then in the Congress, by a margin of 4,040 votes. The National Conference was in the third place then also.

Malik, who joined the AAP in 2013, is an elected District Development Council (DDC) Councilor from the Kahara constituency.

Party chief Arvind Kejriwal welcomed his party candidate's victory.

"I congratulate AAP's Doda candidate Mehraj Malik for his grand victory by defeating the BJP candidate. You fought a great election," he said in a post in Hindi on X.

Kejriwal also congratulated his party for getting an elected lawmaker in the fifth state.

However, the rest of the AAP candidates in J&K did not perform as well as Malik, and in Haryana too, where the party fought alone after seat-sharing talks with the Congress failed, it failed to make a mark.

While the Congress-National Conference is set to gain a majority in J&K, the BJP seems poised to make a comeback in Haryana for the third consecutive term.