Separatists' call of poll boycott helping NC: PDP

By calling for a boycott of polls in Jammu and Kashmir, separatists are only helping the ruling National Conference (NC) and doing no good to the people, the Opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) today said.
"It is an irony that while separatists call for boycott, NC cadres enforce it on the ground as this party is surviving in the post-militancy era, only because of boycott politics," senior PDP leader and former deputy chief minister Muzaffar Hussain Baig said in a statement after a meeting of office bearers of the party's Srinagar district unit.
By calling for boycott of polls, the separatists are unwittingly helping the NC throughout Kashmir Valley in general and Srinagar city in particular, Baig said.

"In the 2008 Assembly elections, NC managed to manipulate and rig results of most of the seats in Srinagar because of low voter turn-out," he alleged and said, at some places NC cohorts even resorted to violence to enforce the boycott.
Having turned Srinagar city into a virtual slum through politician-contractor nexus involving family members of some ministers of the present regime, the NC will again try to bank on boycott politics to rig the polls in the city, Baig said.
"Ironically, the separatists seem to have already started helping them in this regard," he added.
Accusing the NC of enforcing death and destruction in the city while they themselves enjoyed the luxuries of power, Baig added, people can get rid of the NC regime only through democratic means and will have to become agents of change in the upcoming polls.