Nadda appoints Kishan Reddy as election incharge for Jammu and Kashmir

Hyderabad: BJP president J.P. Nadda on Monday appointed Union coal and mines minister G. Kishan Reddy as election incharge of the party for the Assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir, with which he has had a long association. The BJP won two seats from the Union Territory in the recent Lok Sabha polls.

The Supreme Court has directed the Election Commission to hold the elections in Jammu and Kashmir by September.

After the delimitation and voter list revision work, seats in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly have increased from 107 to 114, including 24 in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). The J&K Assembly 43 seats from the Jammu region and 47 in the Kashmir Valley. Of these, nine seats reserved for SCs and seven for the ST communities.

Kishan Reddy is credited with the record surge in tourism in the Union Territory, with the number of arrivals crossing the two-crore mark last year. Besides taking several measures to promote tourism in the valley, he hosted the third G20 tourism meeting in the Valley for three days and attracted global attention.

As a Union minister of state for home previously, Kishan Reddy took up outreach programmes in the trouble-torn Ganderbal and other regions of the UT. His ministry took measures to remove policy bottlenecks and speeded up execution of projects languishing for decades.

In the past, as a Yuva Morcha leader, Kishan Reddy had conducted a “Seema Suraksha Jagaran Yatra” to express solidarity with the people living in the hostile border areas. As BJYM national president, Kishan Reddy had convened the International Youth Conference Against Terrorism in New Delhk, with participants from 54 countries. He founded the World Youth Council against Terrorism (WYCAT), a non-political organisation, to fight terrorism across the world..

In other appointments, Union ministers Bhupender Yadav and Ashwini Vaishnaw were given charge of the Maharashtra polls; Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Tripura former Tripura chief minister Biplab Kumar Deb for Haryana.

Union minister and MP former chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma have been posted to Jharkhand.

Assembly polls in Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand are due later this year.