There was highest recorded participation in this election. Eighty per cent of the people in the Valley voted. MUF received victory in only 4 of the contested 43 electoral constituencies despite its high vote share of 31 per cent (this means that its official vote in the Valley was larger than one-third). The elections were widespreadly believed to have been rigged by the ruling party National Conference, allied with the Indian National Congress. In the absence of rigging, commentators believe that the MUF could have won fifteen to twenty seats, a contention admitted by the National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah. Scholar Sumantra Bose, on the other hand. opines that the MUF would have won most of the constituencies in the Kashmir Valley.