Jammu, Oct 08: The Aam Aadmi Party, which came a cropper in the Haryana elections, has got some solace as it opened its account in Jammu and Kashmir for the first time.
While Malik had secured 22,944 votes, Rana was in second place with 18,174 votes, and Khalid Najib Suhrawardy of the National Conference was third with 12,975 votes. The rest of the candidates, including Abdul Majid Wani of Ghulam Nabi Azad’s Democratic Progressive Azad Party, did not even reach the five-figure mark.
Malik, who joined the AAP in 2013, is an elected District Development Council (DDC) Councilor from the Kahara constituency.
Party chief Arvind Kejriwal welcomed his party candidate’s victory.
“I congratulate AAP’s Doda candidate Mehraj Malik for his grand victory by defeating the BJP candidate. You fought a great election,” he said in a post in Hindi on X.
Kejriwal also congratulated his party for getting an elected lawmaker in the fifth state.
However, the rest of the AAP candidates in J&K did not perform as well as Malik, and in Haryana too, where the party fought alone after seat-sharing talks with the Congress failed, it failed to make a mark.
While the Congress-National Conference is set to gain a majority in J&K, the BJP seems poised to make a comeback in Haryana for the third consecutive term.
