20 Years of PDP: How Muftis Built & Broke Kashmir’s ‘Game-Changer’

PDP, which almost broke the separatist movement in Kashmir, is now fighting for survival.

(Photo: PTI/Altered by The Quint)

The Jammu and Kashmir People’s Democratic Party (PDP) celebrated its 20th foundation day on Sunday, 28 July. The ‘celebrations’ were rather subdued and permeated by apprehension in Kashmir as the Union government might be planning a major offensive in the Valley. Today, the party is perhaps grappling with its most difficult stage since its inception.

However, if one ignores the PDP’s troubles in the previous four years, it remains one of the few successful political experiments in Kashmir. At its peak, the PDP changed the political landscape of the Valley and became a major threat not just to its rival the National Conference but also to separatist political actors.

‘Separatist’ or ‘IB Creation’?

The PDP’s sudden emergence in Kashmir’s political landscape is itself a bit of an enigma. Mufti Mohammad Sayeed was an unlikely agent of change in Kashmir’s politics. For much of his career, he remained a staunch Congressman, and was particularly loyal to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

Some say that his commitment to New Delhi’s position on Kashmir was such that he even viewed the National Conference with suspicion. As part of the Janata Dal, he was elected from Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh in the 1989 Lok Sabha elections and became India’s first Muslim home minister. At the time, few expected that ten years later, Sayeed would form a party which was labelled “soft separatist”.

“I can doubt even LK Advani’s patriotism but I will never doubt Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s commitment to the Indian nation,” a top separatist leader is known to have joked, at the suggestion of Sayeed being soft separatist.

The Hurriyat Conference has consistently alleged that the PDP was the creation of Indian intelligence agencies.

On the other hand, former Research and Analysis Wing Chief and former Special Director of the Intelligence Bureau, AS Dulat, wrote in his book Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years that PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti had links with the Hizbul Mujahideen and alleged that the militant outfit helped the PDP in the 2002 Assembly elections.

Rather than getting into speculation about how it was founded, it would be better to look at the effect PDP’s formation had on Kashmir’s politics.

How PDP Broke NC’s Monopoly

The PDP’s biggest impact was breaking the NC’s monopoly in mainstream politics in the state. This becomes particularly clear if one looks at the electoral history of Jammu and Kashmir.

After years of tussle with the Centre, including the incarceration of the party’s founder Sheikh Abdullah, the NC began fighting elections consistently after the Indira-Abdullah Accord of 1975.

In every election between 1977 and 1996, the NC consistently won 40 seats or more in the 87-member state Assembly.

The PDP broke the monopoly of the National Conference over Kashmir politics(Photo Courtesy: Reuters) 

In 1987, it won 40 seats, fighting in alliance with the Congress, in elections that are alleged to have been rigged. The NC’s main rival was the Muslim United Front with the pen and ink pot as its election symbol. Many of the defeated MUF candidates and functionaries like Syed Salahuddin and Yasin Malik subsequently joined the militancy in Kashmir. Mufti Sayeed is said to have informally campaigned for MUF in 1987 due to his opposition to Abdullah and Rajiv Gandhi. And when he formed the PDP, he chose the MUF’s pen and ink pot as his election symbol.

Ever since the PDP entered the political arena, the NC has failed to cross 28 seats in the Assembly and went down to 15 seats in 2014. The PDP on the other hand, has been consistently growing, from 16 seats in 2002, 21 seats in 2008 to 28 seats in 2014.

Most of its seats have come from the Kashmir Valley, which accounts for 46 seats in the state Assembly. It is because of the PDP that the Kashmir Valley moved from a one-party dominant system to a two-party competition.

Strangely, the PDP’s rise worked to the benefit of both the Centre as well as militant outfits. The emergence of a counterweight to the NC gave New Delhi much greater bargaining power in Kashmir. Between 1987 and 1999, the NC had become aggressive in its demands from the Centre, especially given how Farooq Abdullah had begun talking about ‘autonomy’. Now, the Centre could easily pit one party against the other and back whichever suited its interests the best.

From the militants’ perspective, the PDP’s rise came as a relief as the party disbanded the counterinsurgents known as Ikhwan, who had inflicted heavy losses on the militant ranks.

Even from the perspective of the Kashmiri public, the weakening of NC’s dominance and the disbanding of the notorious Ikhwan were both positive developments, as it brought a phase of relative calm in the Valley.

A Threat to Separatists

Unsurprisingly, the PDP’s rise also coincided or probably even caused an increase in the participation of Kashmiris in the electoral process. Between 2002 and 2014, the turnout in Assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir increased by over 20 percentage points. The PDP’s vote share also more than doubled during this period.

It is possible that the PDP managed to mobilise sections that had become alienated in the 1990s. It benefitted from some support from a part of the Jamaat-e-Islami and some of the erstwhile support base of the MUF of 1987. For the Jamaat, the PDP’s rise brought some protection from the attacks it had to face at the hands of the security forces and the Ikhwan. On its part, the PDP saw the Jamaat’s educational and welfare activities as beneficial and not necessarily threatening.

The PDP’s emergence also made it acceptable for some Kashmiris to vote in Assembly and civic elections based on local issues, while still supporting the ideal of azadi.

This made the PDP a threat for the separatist groups as well. In the period between 2002 to 2008, separatists were on the verge of being rendered redundant, with the PDP voicing many of their concerns within the framework of India’s Constitution.

Mehbooba Mufti was often the first to visit the families of those killed in encounters or to express solidarity with victims of atrocities at the hands of security forces. Sometimes her rhetoric would be even more emotive than that of separatist leaders.

The PDP’s Self Rule Document of 2008 was a revolutionary idea for a mainstream political party. It included, among other things:

• The economic integration of Jammu and Kashmir on both sides of the Line of Control, with a dual currency system
• The creation of a Regional Council of Greater Jammu and Kashmir, with representatives from both sides of the LoC to replace the existing Jammu and Kashmir Assembly
• Making Jammu and Kashmir immune from the imposition of Article 356, that is the imposition of President’s Rule
• Giving the people of the entire Jammu and Kashmir region the right to elect their head of state, instead of a Governor appointed by the Government of India

Many in the separatist ranks believe that if the Amarnath land issue had not come up in 2008, the PDP could have succeeded in shrinking the political space for them quite considerably.

A Conservative Muslim Party

Having no previous support base of their own, unlike the NC or even the separatists, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed and Mehbooba Mufti played their cards quite cleverly and appealed to diverse sections. While Mehbooba Mufti succeeded in wooing a part of the pro-separatist sections, her father kept New Delhi happy by continuing to present himself as someone trustworthy.

In addition to this, the PDP promoted Syeds and landed elites who might have lost out due to the NC’s land reforms and also expanded the party’s base in South Kashmir, where the NC was comparatively weak.

Unlike the NC, the PDP had very little ethno-nationalist elements in its ideology, and presented itself as a conservative Muslim party.

Mufti Sayeed knew the pulse of Kashmiri Muslim opinion and the PDP cleverly articulated it within the Indian framework.

So, the PDP brought down its own coalition government with the Congress on the Amarnath land issue, that had angered Kashmiri Muslims, irrespective of the mainstream-separatist divide.

When it was in Opposition between 2008 and 2014, the PDP took on the NC-Congress government in the state and the UPA government at the Centre over encounter killings and their handling of the protests of 2010. Mehbooba Mufti was at the forefront of the voices attacking the Omar Abdullah government for its failure during this period.

Having said that, the 2008 and 2010 protests led to a revival in separatist sentiments and there were limits to which the PDP could continue to be a safety valve.

The party, however, did benefit immensely from the public anger against the NC. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the PDP was at its peak, and won all three seats in the Kashmir Valley. The party’s Tariq Hameed Karra defeated NC patriarch Farooq Abdullah by 42,000 votes. This was Abdullah’s first ever electoral defeat and a sweet victory for Mufti Sayeed over his arch-rival in Kashmiri politics.

In the run-up to the Assembly elections later that year, the PDP managed to project itself as the fiercest opponent of the BJP, which was expanding under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Party President Amit Shah.

The PDP exhibited its best performance, winning 28 seats: 25 seats in the Kashmir Valley and three in the Muslim-dominated pockets of Jammu.

However, that’s when it began going downhill for the PDP...

PDP’s Downfall

Mufti Mohammad Sayeed could have formed a government with the help of the NC and the Congress but it chose to go with the BJP, which proved costly for the PDP.

The elections had witnessed an incredibly high turnout in Kashmir, with several people coming out to vote for the first time since 1987, just to keep the BJP from assuming power. The main beneficiary of this was the PDP, which had run a fiercely anti-BJP campaign.

But Mufti Sayeed squandered this mandate by aligning with the BJP. Many voters saw it as a betrayal comparable to the allegedly rigged election of 1987.

Mufti’s calculation was that if the Valley’s Muslims could accept his coalition with the Congress, which had a far more troubled relationship with the Valley, they would accept his alliance with the BJP as well. But Mufti erred in mistaking Modi’s BJP for Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s BJP.

The BJP under Modi was seen as being increasingly hostile towards Muslims and also followed a far more aggressive policy in Kashmir. This alienated several Kashmiris, particularly those aligned to the Jamaat-e-Islami, who may have tactically supported the PDP in the past.

Still the PDP managed to survive with Mufti appeasing New Delhi and Mehbooba trying to placate whatever remained of the PDP’s support base in the Valley.

But this dual game came to an end after Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s death in January 2016. Mehbooba Mufti was now stuck with the unenviable task of playing both roles. She could have broken ties with the BJP and reached out to NC and Congress for support but chose to preserve the alliance instead.

People carrying the body of Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Mufti Mohammad Sayeed during his funeral procession, in Srinagar (Photo: PTI)

The last straw for the PDP was the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen Commander Burhan Wani in July 2016, which sparked widespread protests in the Valley. Even then, the PDP could have salvaged some support by taking a stand adversarial to the Centre, but it did not.

Whatever support Mehbooba Mufti had accumulated over the years by articulating Kashmiri anger and expressing solidarity with those whose loved ones were killed by security forces, had come to nought. For angry, pro-Azadi Kashmiris, she was now nothing more than a Quisling.

In June 2018, BJP withdrew support from Mehbooba Mufti’s government.

The PDP paid the price for two judgment errors by the Muftis. First, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed failed to understand that Modi, Shah and the RSS saw Kashmir as an unfinished ideological battle and there was no chance of them displaying the statesmanship which was customary of Vajpayee.

Second, the Muftis misjudged the anger that an alliance with the BJP would spark among Kashmiri Muslims.

What Lies Ahead

The PDP is facing a crisis of survival today. There was once a time when Mehbooba Mufti could go to separatist hotbeds where few politicians would venture. Now PDP leaders find it difficult to go into their own pocket-boroughs.

Several of its top leaders have quit the party or are preparing to jump ship. Tariq Hameed Karra, who had defeated Farooq Abdullah in 2014, fell out with the party due to its alliance with BJP and finally quit the party in the wake of the protests after Burhan Wani’s killing. He joined the Congress in 2017.

More recently, Mohammad Khalil Bandh, one of the founding members of the PDP, quit the party saying that, “There is no point continuing in a party that has compromised on its core principles”. He has now joined the NC.

The leaders who remain have troubles of their own. Senior leader Naeem Akhtar is facing a crime branch probe over alleged irregularities in the J&K Projects Construction Corporation.

The party’s leaders and workers are facing attacks from militants as well. Party leader and Mehbooba Mufti’s relative Mufti Sajjad was attacked earlier this month in the Mufti family’s hometown Bijbehara. His Personal Security Officer was killed in the attack.

With Amit Shah having replaced the more conciliatory Rajnath Singh as the home minister, the Modi government may also adopt a more aggressive policy in Kashmir, one that targets not just separatists but also mainstream parties like PDP and NC.

However, the common ground between NC and PDP is increasing. The two parties are facing hostility from the Centre as well as negotiating a rapidly shrinking space for pro-India parties.

The NC has already adopted an adversarial approach towards the Centre. The PDP will also do the same, especially if the Centre makes any move against Article 35a. But the problem is, no one might be willing to listen to the PDP this time around.