Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, June 14: Reminding the BJP of its tall assurances to simultaneously hold the Parliamentary and Assembly elections in the country, Harsh Dev Singh, chairman, JKNPP and former Minister asked the saffron party to set a precedent by holding the Assembly elections in J&K along with the Lok Sabha elections in 2019 as it was running the Governments both at the Centre as well as in the State.
Harsh was addressing a press conference in Jammu. He pointed out that Prime Minister Narendra Modi started a debate a while ago about holding elections to simultaneous elections to Parliament and the State Assemblies. The media appeared to be in favour of the idea and the Election Commission, whose duty was to implement it on the ground, lent its weight as well, he said.
He further said that the Prime Minister had time and again supported the idea of holding simultaneous elections to Panchayats, Urban Local Bodies, States and Parliament so that parties and workers spending too much time and money in electioneering could make use of the time for social work and take people-oriented programmes to the grassroots.
He maintained that for the current Government, this was also important because in 2014 election manifesto, the BJP had vociferously trumpeted that if came to power, it would evolve a method to hold Lok Sabha and Assembly elections simultaneously. Besides, the J&K Assembly would already be in its fifth year in 2019 having given sufficient time to the incumbent Government to prove its credentials, he said.
Singh also asked the BJP-PDP coalition to bring the legislation to reduce the term of State Assembly to five years from the present six like other Indian states and end the political anomaly once and for all.
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