Home Minister Amit Shah chairs key meeting of BJP Jammu and Kashmir

New Delhi, July 5: Union Home Minister Amit Shah held a key meeting of the BJP Jammu and Kashmir. Several Bharatiya Janata Party leaders attended the meeting held in the national capital on Thursday.

BJP leader Devinder Kumar Maniyal after attending the meet said, "J&K is a UT and is directly under the MHA. Home Minister holds such meetings quarterly after two months. It was a meeting mainly about the parliamentary elections that have just taken place. We gave detailed information on the entire election...We will contest on all 90 seats in the upcoming elections..."

Notably, J&K is likely to see its first Assembly election in September this year, according to the timeline fixed by the Supreme Court after the erstwhile State's special status was scrapped in 2019. The last Assembly election in the erstwhile State was held in 2014.

The BJP-led government scrapped Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019 and bifurcated the state into two union territories. There have been demands from political parties for early assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir and restoration of statehood.

Earlier, the Supreme Court had asked the Election Commission of India and the Centre to conduct polls by September.

Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Rajiv Kumar earlier said that the J-K Assembly polls will be held after the Lok Sabha elections.

In an interview with ANI, CEC Kumar said, "We are yet to hold assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir. I mentioned in the press conference earlier that the way for conducting legal elections has opened since December 23. This is March, and there is snowfall in the region, hence the question of holding elections does not arise at this point."
"We (ECI) went to Jammu and Kashmir and were asked by all the political parties there to hold the state assembly elections with the Lok Sabha polls. After that, we held administrative meetings wherein it was discussed that a lot of security forces would be required to conduct state assembly election with Lok Sabha election in J-K," he said.