National Conference (NC) President, Farooq Abdullah, on Wednesday expressed his biggest fear after his party's success in the recently concluded assembly elections. The former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir said he was worried about repaying the faith the people have shown by giving mandate to his party-led alliance.
Senior Abdullah's comments came a day after the NC-Congress alliance won the Jammu and Kashmir assembly elections by bagging 49 seats in the 90-member house.
“My biggest fear is whether or not I will be able to repay the trust that people have shown in us. May God help us in living up to their expectations. There are many challenges. Some of them are inflation and unemployment," Farooq Abdullah is heard saying to news agency PTI.
In the results declared on Tuesday, while the NC emerged as a major party in the Valley, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also increased its vote share and won 29 seats, all in Jammu.
"Our effort will be to minimise the differences that have grown between Jammu and Kashmir. We hope the people of Jammu will have faith in us in the future, and they think we will treat them the same way as we treat people in the Kashmir valley,” Abdullah said.
The BJP improved its performance by winning 29 seats in the Union Territory. In the last Jammu and Kashmir assembly elections held in 2014, the BJP won 25 seats. All the BJP seats in the 2014 assembly elections, too, came from the Jammu division. The BJP is yet to open account in the Kashmir division in assembly polls.
Jammu and Kashmir's 90 seats voted for in three phases–September 18, 25 and October 1. The assembly election in the UT is the first since 2014 and also the first since the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019.
Earlier in the day, Farooq's son and the probable CM of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, indicated that the National Conference was open to talks with Mehbooba Mufti's Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) if a channel of communication opened from the latter's side.
Omar, however, said that issue is not a priority for his party at the moment.
Omar Abdullah also made it clear that neither his party had made any approach to the PDP, nor the PDP had made any effort to initiate talks.
“Right now, we are not having any talks on this. No approach has been made to us by the PDP, we have made no approach to them. I think, at the moment, given the results of the elections, which have been quite a setback to them, I can understand that there must be a lot of internal discussion going on. At some point in time, if a channel of communication opens, we will sit down and talk to them. But it's not a priority for us at the moment,” Omar was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.
