The recount of the votes obtained in the District Development Council elections in Jammu and Kashmir, the first direct election in the newly sculpted union territory, is underway.
As of 1.10 pm, the state electoral authority has released leads for 224 seats out of a total of 280 in the 20 districts of Jammu and Kashmir. So far, nearly 13% of the roughly three million votes cast in the eight-phase elections have been counted.
The early trends give the Popular Alliance for the Gupkar Declaration (PAGD), an amalgamation of several political parties that came together after the effective nullification of the special constitutional position of the old state, a distinct advantage.
The alliance led in 87 seats, or 39% of the seats for which trends are known. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is emerging in second position with a 54-seat lead (24%). Congress, which has been one of the main political forces in Jammu and Kashmir, was in the lead with just 26 seats, while the newly formed Apni Party of Jammu and Kashmir has so far achieved an advantage by just 10 seats.
Another clear trend as of now is that the pre-existing political polarization between the Hindu-majority Jammu and Muslim-majority Kashmir regions has continued in the latest round of elections.
At 1:10 p.m., the PAGD was leading in 64 out of 111 seats in Kashmir, so the trends were known, while the BJP managed to have an advantage by just 2 seats. In the Jammu region, by contrast, the BJP led in 52 of the 115 seats for which the trends were known, while the PAGD managed to lead in 23 seats.
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