Kashmir Impulse Desk
Srinagar, Oct 07
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said on Wednesday that he would decide on expanding his council of ministers after returning from a GST Council meeting in Delhi and consulting National Conference President Farooq Abdullah.
Omar had earlier said the expansion would take place after the assembly session, which concluded recently.
“I would have done it during these days, but tomorrow there is a GST Council meeting in Delhi,” he told reporters. “After completing that and returning, I will consult with Farooq sahab and decide on the next course of action.”
The chief minister also said he was looking to ongoing Supreme Court proceedings to make it harder to remove voters from electoral rolls through the Special Intensive Revision (SIR).
SIR has not yet been undertaken in Jammu and Kashmir.
Omar alleged that the exercise could be used to influence elections, drawing a comparison with the delimitation exercise in J&K, which he said had benefited the BJP.
He said proceedings concerning Form 6 could make it more difficult to delete names from voter lists.
The chief minister also defended the INDIA bloc’s protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, rejecting the BJP’s description of allegations against the Election Commission as fabricated.
“If it were fabricated, why don’t they take action against the newspaper through which all this came to light?” Omar said, referring to reports published by The Indian Express.
He said the protests followed a decision taken at an INDIA bloc meeting in Delhi, where Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had announced a month-long programme.
Asked about Prime Minister Narendra Modi completing 25 years at the head of government, Omar congratulated him, saying repeated electoral victories over such a long period showed he had done something right.
“He must have done something right for people to have voted for him repeatedly,” Omar said.
On transfers of bureaucrats ordered by Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha, Omar said the changes appeared to have been made after due consideration and that his government would work with officers in their new assignments.
On recruitment rules, the chief minister said the process was almost complete and that officials were resolving contradictions and legal ambiguities in earlier drafts.
“We didn’t want to rush into this only to have counterproductive results,” he said, adding that the rules would be notified “very soon”.
