With just five months to go for the assembly polls, Urdu newspapers have starting reserving much of their space for election-related stories.
Election fever has gradually started gripping the Urdu press in Kashmir. With just five months to go for the assembly polls, Urdu newspapers have starting reserving much of their space for election-related stories. From mainstream leaders to separatist voices, stories and opinions related to polls have inundated the newspapers.
Srinagar Times summed up the mood of political parties in its page one cartoon on May 25. It showed the three main players, Mufti Sayeed, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Farooq Abdullah in wrestling jerseys ready to fight in the ring.
The paper also wrote an editorial comment on the Jamait-e-Islami’s flip-flop on the election boycott. “Jamait-e-Islami does not talk of election boycott… They say they want a solution to the Kashmir problem according to the wishes of Kashmiri people, but fall short of calling for a poll boycott.
There is a visible difference in the approach of Jamait and Hurriyat hawk Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Jamait wants to leave the decision to the people while Geelani wants a complete boycott of polls,” it commented in its May 2 issue.
The paper also projected in its May 13 cartoon the predicament of the crowd ‘hired’ by various political parties. It showed a man breathing heavily, running from one venue to another with a caption ‘Double Shift’.
‘National Congress will unearth every scandal, says Farooq Abdullah’, screamed the banner headline of Daily Alsafa on May 5. The paper also carried a report about PDP’s failure in engineering defections in other political parties in the run-up to the polls.
Daily Aftab carried a front page story about employment sops doled out by the Azad-led government. The government has constituted a 16-member committee to put the employment package on the fast track, informed the headline.
Elections apart, it was the sex scandal which hogged headlines in the Urdu press. The bombshell dropped by Congress MP Madan Lal Sharma alleging Sonia Gandhi saved speaker Tara Chand from the noose in the case was carried as banner headlines in almost all dailies in Kashmir. The new revelation brought back the ghost of the infamous sex racket involving ministers, bureaucrats, police officers and paramilitary officers to haunt the Azad-led government.
Kashmir Uzma tried to focus on the legal battle over the sex scandal issue. ‘Constitution of full bench challenged: heated debate on the sex scandal case’, shouted the headline of the newspaper on May 13.
“Speaker has set a new standard of responsibility”, Srinagar Times sarcastically commented through a headline on May 6. “It is an election year and in coming days we will see more explosive revelations. These issues do not amuse people but create an interest in learning more about such murky deals,” the newspaper opined.
President Prathiba Patil’s photograph brandishing an AK-47 triggered a storm in newspapers. Daily Eta’ laat in its editorial asked who was the target. “Why did the president feel the need to brandish the AK-47? Was it aimed at Kashmiris who are already under constant threat from the gun-wielding security forces, or was the gun aimed at the stuttering Indo-Pak peace process,” wrote the newspaper in its May 28 issue.
h_ishfaq@dnaindia.net
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