Jammu and Kashmir Assembly Speaker Abdul Rahim Rather on Thursday rejected the Bharatiya Janata Party's demand for either rolling back the special status resolution passed by the House or stepping down, and said if the party does not have faith in him it should bring a no-confidence motion.
More than 40 per cent of the 908 candidates contesting the assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir are Independents, leading to claims that a large number of them have been propped up by the Bharatiya Janata Party to divide votes.
The number of active terrorists in the valley is at its lowest in the last 34 years, General Officer Commanding of Chinar Corps Lieutenant General A D S Aujla said.
"So, there was no infiltration of any Afghani Taliban... To that effect, we have been able to control (things)," he said.
Dar was appointed as a daily wage employee in the state Health Department and has been on election duty since Wednesday.
2016 saw the worst unrest in the Kashmir valley in 26 years.
Fifty-six-year-old Piccard, who completed the first non-stop flight around the world in an air balloon in 1999, said he and his team were hopeful of getting permission for landing in the two Indian cities.
Tourism and handicrafts sectors -- the pivots of state's economy--were the worst hit due to disturbances in normal life due to strike calls and curfew over a period of 26 days since the hanging of Guru on February nine in Delhi's Tihar jail.
Several established and upstarting manufacturing companies, hotels and restaurants have laid off staff due to prolonged agitation which is showing no signs of ending.
The heavy turnout in the first two phases of elections in Jammu and Kashmir has sharpened the urban-rural divide in the Kashmir Valley with both sides blaming each other for the "political mess" in the state.
Many of the 14,600 aspirants, who want to cross the border to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir on the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus, will have to wait more than a decade for their wish to come true, if there is no change in the frequency of the existing service.The fortnightly bus service, which has completed three years of operation, can only ferry 450 passengers a year on an average to the other side of the border. Alto14,600 applications have been received from Kashmiris to visit PoK
"We have broken the back of Hizbul Mujahideen in south Kashmir. Only over the past two months, several top ranking commanders of the outfit have either been arrested or killed in operations by security forces," Inspector General of Central Reserve Police Force M S Gupta told PTI. Stressing that militancy was on the wane in Kashmir, especially in the south, Gupta said it was not prudent to reduce the number of security personnel in the valley.
Though 1,460 complaints of human rights violations were registered against the armed forces, only 33 were found to be true.
Hard-line separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani had asked the non-Kashmiri work force to leave the valley after the rape-and-murder of 14-year-old Tabinda Jan in Langate area of Kupwara district in which 2 labourers were allegedly involved.
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