Excelsior Correspondent
SRINAGAR, Apr 22: Senior PDP leader and former Deputy Chief Minister Muzaffar Hussain Baig has said that by calling for poll boycott separatists were doing no good to the people except helping National Conference as it is the only party that has always benefited from boycott politics.
“It is an irony that while separatists call for boycott, the NC cadres enforce it on the ground as this party is surviving in the post-militancy era only because of boycott politics,” Mr Baig said while addressing a meeting of the office bearers of party’s Srinagar district unit.
The meeting was presided over by party president Mehbooba Mufti and attended among others by senior leaders Moulana Iftikhar Hussain Ansari, Mohd Dilawar Mir general secretary, Tariq Hameed Qarra, Syed Altaf Bukhari and Naeem Akhtar.
Mr Baig said by calling for poll boycott separatists were unwittingly helping NC and this has proved true throughout Kashmir valley in general and the Srinagar city in particular. “In 2008 Assembly elections also, NC managed to manipulate and rig results of most of the seats in Srinagar because of low voter turn-out,” he said and added that at some places in 2008 polls, some NC cohorts even resorted to violence to enforce boycott.
Mr Baig said having turned the historic Srinagar city into a virtual slum through politico-contractor nexus involving family members of some ministers of the present regime, NC would now again try to bank on boycott politics to rig the polls in the city and ironically the separatists seem to have already started helping them in this regard.
He alleged that Srinagar city had turned out to be the worst victim of NC’s monopolistic strangles hold for decades and except for making emotional exploitation of its residents the party had not done any thing for the city.
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