Abrogating Art-370 didn’t hamper democratic process, rather streamlined it: Kavinder

STATE TIMES NEWS

JAMMU: Senior BJP leader and former deputy chief minister Kavinder Gupta on Sunday asserted that Modi Government’s bold decision of scrapping Article 370 has no impact on continuation of democratic processes in J&K rather it has streamlined the same unlike the Congress and NC regimes in the past which used to linger on polls on account of unfounded alibis.
In a statement issued to media persons, he cited that urban local bodies elections were conducted in 1978 and thereafter in 2005 under the Congress and NC regimes but the BJP Government is very particular in decentralizing powers in the UT and that is the reason behind holding ULB polls in 2018. He said that under the Modi regime, the next ULB elections will also be held as per schedule as the central dispensation is quite serious about implementing grassroots level democracy viz three tier system. He said that NC and Congress regimes in the past were reluctant to keep the power in their hands rather than shifting the onus of running affairs of the erstwhile state directly into the hands of people through Urban Local Bodies formation as the inordinate delay in conduct of these elections is testimony to this fact.
Kavinder also assured that centre led by PM Narendra Modi is committed to hold Assembly polls in the UT as soon as possible because all the bottlenecks have now been removed. He said that the Union Government has toiled hard to ensure early polls in J&K as delimitation exercise and the publication of electoral rolls have been accomplished successfully and it is now prerogative of Election Commission to announce the dates for polls. He said that anytime soon in 2023, the elections could be announced in J&K and therefore people raising fingers should desist from doing this as the government led by PM Modi has completed the homework necessary to hold free and fair elections in J&K.