Sham Lal Sharma, a former Jammu and Kashmir minister and BJP vice president, was involved in an accident on Monday when his car collided with a truck. The event occurred on the Akhnoor-Poonch route as the vehicle was approaching from the opposite way.

Sham Lal Sharma is the younger brother of two-time Congress MP Madan Lal Sharma, who had won the Jammu-Poonch seat for two consecutive terms in 2004 and 2009.

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He is considered a strong voice in the Jammu region, had been Congress MLA twice from his home constituency of Akhnoor and served as a cabinet minister in the NC-Congress coalition government in 2008.

He lost to BJP candidate Rajeev Sharma in 2014 from Akhnoor when the saffron brigade won a historic 25 seats from Jammu region in the Assembly elections.

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Sharma was always seen as a pro-Jammu and Kashmiri politician, and it was he who asked on the floor of the lower house that if Jammu and Kashmir were secular, why couldn’t it have a Hindu chief minister under the NC-Congress coalition government? He was subsequently the Public Health Engineering Minister until resigning while criticising some of his NC colleagues for “discrimination” towards the Jammu area.

Last year, in a big defeat for the Congress in Jammu and Kashmir, senior party leader and former minister Sham Lal Sharma joined the BJP on Saturday, only 12 days before the state’s first round of parliamentary elections.

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Sharma, who resigned as senior vice president of the Jammu and Kashmir Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) in 2020 due to disagreements with the party’s state unit’s chief Ghulam Ahmed Mir, joined the BJP in the presence of the party’s national vice president and In-charge Jammu and Kashmir affairs Avinash Rai Khanna and state president Ravinder Raina.