Today in Politics: PM Modi in Jammu, will inaugurate the world’s highest railway bridge

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit Jammu on Tuesday to inaugurate a slew of development programmes and address a public meeting. This will be his second visit to Jammu and Kashmir since the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019 and becomes crucial ahead of the coming Lok Sabha polls. The PM will also interact with beneficiaries of various government schemes as part of the “Viksit Bharat Viksit Jammu” programme.

The importance of the elections in J&K, which has not had an elected Assembly since 2014, was underlined by Union Minister Jitendra Singh who recently said the following in Udhampur: “We want the Prime Minister to visit J&K before the start of the election code of conduct.”

The visit is the PM’s first since the Supreme Court last December held the abrogation of Article 370, which gave special status to the erstwhile state of J&K, as constitutionally valid and went on to order the restoration of statehood and instruct the Centre to hold Assembly elections by September 2024.

The BJP has hit the ground running in J&K. In January, the party held the first meeting of its state election committee in the Union Territory and a workshop on its countrywide “Gaon Chalo Abhiyan”.

In the 2019 polls, the BJP won two Lok Sabha seats – Jammu and Udhampur. These seats in the Jammu region are predominantly Hindu constituencies and could be easy seats to sail through this time too, with major opponents National Conference (NC), PDP and Congress not having any popular and widely recognisable faces here. Apart from this, the party is also looking at the Anantnag seat in Kashmir this time around, Sunil Sethi, the chief spokesperson of the J&K BJP unit has said.

On Tuesday, the PM will inaugurate AIIMS, Jammu; the world’s highest railway