JAMMU: Mehraj Malik of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), who made history in December 2020 by delivering the party’s first win in Jammu and Kashmir’s local body polls, has now clinched the Doda legislative seat, marking AAP’s first-ever Assembly seat in the region. This milestone comes during J&K’s first Assembly elections in a decade.
Malik defeated BJP’s Gajay Singh Rana by 4,538 votes and surpassed National Conference’s Khalid Najib Suharwardy by a margin of 9,894 votes, after 13 rounds of vote counting.
In 2014, BJP’s Shakti Raj won the Doda seat, though historically, the seat has alternated between the National Conference and the Congress since the first elections in 1962. Notably, the Doda seat lies in the Jammu region, where the BJP has claimed a strong foothold, winning a significant portion of its 29 seats from this area.
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Malik’s victory also comes in a region recently affected by several terror incidents. In August, an Army Captain was killed in a skirmish with militants in the Assar region, with a civilian injured in the violence. Security forces had recovered a U.S.-made assault rifle and other equipment. This followed a deadly July encounter in Doda that led to the deaths of four Army personnel, including an officer.
Doda also holds political significance as Prime Minister Narendra Modi kickstarted the BJP’s campaign for the Jammu and Kashmir elections in this region. His visit last month was the first by a sitting Prime Minister to Doda in over 40 years.
Despite Malik’s victory, the election was largely dominated by the National Conference-Congress alliance, which claimed 49 seats.