People’s Alliance loses People’s Conference; ‘breach of trust’, says Sajad Lone

Srinagar: The unity forged by Kashmiri parties in the Public Alliance for Gupkar Declaration (PAGD) has proved to be short-lived. Just a few months after it was formed, the alliance’s spokesperson Sajad Gani Lone called it quits on Tuesday, citing “breach of trust” as reason for the break-up.
In a letter to Farooq Abdullah, Lone, the chairman of Peoples Conference (PC), said that differences cropped up during the DDC elections over seat shearing, though at the time Lone had denied any talk of differences, and that the allies fielded proxy candidates against each other.
“People know that blinded by political greed we fielded candidates against each other… On the face of it, PAGD won these elections unambiguously, having won the maximum number of seats, but we can’t hide behind selective statistics. The other important statistic is the number of votes polled against the PAGD,” Lone said in his letter that he released to the media in Srinagar.
Lone’s party will be first to depart from the alliance, and it remains unknown for how long the rest of the club will stay together. There has as yet been no statement from the PAGD.
According to Lone, the votes polled against the PAGD were mostly those cast for proxies of PAGD’s constituent parties against the official PAGD candidates. And the net outcome of selectively voting for and against PAGD, he said, was a very poor vote share.
Lone’s flip-flop has come on the heels of his terming the votes secured by the PAGD as a success and a befitting answer to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The PAGD had won 112 of the 280 seats in the maiden district elections, of which PC won eight.
Lone also said that the people on the ground were looking at the actions and intentions of the political players, and not the statistics. “They are eyewitnesses to our actions. They are the spectators of the political theatre scripted by us. And we think that people don’t know what we were up to. People know that blinded by political greed we fielded candidates against each other,” Lone said.
Lone said that people had doubts over the PAGD as they saw that when trust was not maintained on the DDC elections, then how could it be maintained on bigger causes.

Junaid Nabi Bazaz