J&K Polls: Shabir Shah, Barkati et al May Pull Down NC-Congress to BJP’s Benefit

The BJP is also wooing the large Pahadi population of the Rajouri and Poonch districts.

The BJP is pulling out all stops to recover ground in the Jammu region, where the Congress polled 42 and 40 per cent of the votes for the Jammu and the Udhampur Lok Sabha constituencies respectively.

(Photo: Erum Gour/The Quint)

[This is Part II of a three-part curtain-raiser on the J&K assembly elections scheduled between 18 September and 1 October. Read Part I here.]

The BJP’s preparations for the upcoming assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir got off to a rocky start, with its first list of candidates being hastily withdrawn amid protests by workers. Behind the scenes, the party’s two former deputy chief ministers and a leader from the traditionally rambunctious Surankote were apparently among those who threw down the gauntlet. 

They were up in arms against those who had recently joined the party being given tickets in the first list, which, it appears, was prepared in Delhi by a leader from Kishtwar. Former National Conference leader Devinder Rana (whose brother, Jitendra Singh, is a minister in the prime minister’s office) is among late entrants to the BJP.

Despite the brouhaha, the party has set itself rather ambitious targets. BJP insiders say they may put up several candidates in Kashmir and will contest eleven Valley seats vigorously, with a strong emphasis on five.   

These include the Habba Kadal constituency, which was once the hub of the Valley’s Pandit community. The party’s strategists may hope that migrant Pandits’ postal ballots see them through there. They apparently have a similar strategy for another constituency in Anantnag district. 

In addition, the party hopes to win three Valley seats that have a large proportion of Pahadi voters—Gurez, Karnah, and Uri.

As I argued in Part I of this series, and in my prediction of a MUF 2.0, while the BJP is pushing to win as many seats as it can, mainly in the Jammu region, it also hopes that the candidature of men like the fiery cleric Sarjan Barkati will pull down the main Opposition’s tally.

Barkati, a leading rabble-rouser of the agitations that followed the killing of Burhan Wani, filed his nomination on Tuesday from the Zainpora assembly constituency in Shopian district on Tuesday—from jail.

The Valley was also rife with speculation that the one-time icon of Kashmir’s freedom struggle, Shabir Shah, might join the fray. He has suddenly been freed by a Delhi court. He and several other one-time separatists were jailed in July 2017 for money laundering, and so have completed the maximum sentence—seven years. So, it would be reasonable for the others too to be released.

Such candidates (and those backed by north Kashmir MP 'Engineer' Rashid, possibly also the Jamaat-e-Islami) could pull down the National Conference and Congress party alliance’s tally. BJP strategists are determined that the Opposition alliance mustn’t win a majority of the union territory’s 90 assembly seats.

BJP May Win Only One in the Valley

Let us take a moment to examine the BJP’s hope that it could win five Valley seats. Faqir Mohammed Khan is indeed a strong candidate for Tuleil-Gurez, but that’s probably the only Valley seat for which the BJP has a fighting chance.

Among the five in its sights, Uri might prove a particularly elusive target, since there are perhaps as many voters who respectively identify as Gujjar and as Kashmiri as the number who identify as Pahadi. Long-time NC minister Shafi Uri’s son, Sajjad, is a strong contender there.

A Pahadi leader from one of these three, who was once a minister, told me that the BJP told community leaders how dismayed it was that the Pahadis did not back their proxies in the Lok Sabha polls, although the BJP had included the union territory’s Pahadis in a reserved category—which the community has long sought but was never given in the past.

Such leaders seem willing to go with the BJP if that is what it takes to show their gratitude for what a Pahadi youth leader called a 'historic' decision. How many voters they will be able to persuade remains to be seen. 

The party is also wooing the much larger Pahadi population of the Rajouri and Poonch districts. The BJP hopes that the recent induction of former minister Chaudhary Zulfiqar Ali, a prominent Gujjar leader, into the party too will give it a boost, but Congress leader Shah Mohammed Chaudhary predicts that Zulfiqar will lose his seat.   

All Systems Go 

Meanwhile, the BJP is pulling out all stops to recover ground in the Jammu region, where the Congress polled 42 and 40 percent of the votes for the Jammu and the Udhampur Lok Sabha constituencies respectively.

The BJP did win, polling around 50 per cent of the votes cast in both constituencies of what is broadly known as the Jammu region. But the Congress’s creditable showing must have shocked top BJP leaders—that too, in the first two phases of the prolonged Lok Sabha elections, when the BJP’s rhetoric about winning more than 400 seats was still riding high.

Indeed, most observers, including voters, were sure soon after the voting that the Congress was winning at least the Udhampur seat, from where Jitendra Singh got a third term. BJP insiders say that the minister and Jugal Kishore, who holds the Jammu seat, have both often been on the ground in their constituencies since their close call. 

The BJP hopes to win 26, and up to 30, of the 43 seats in the Jammu region. Whether it manages will depend partly on the performance of the Congress, which has not been very visible on the ground so far.

It was only about ten days ago that the Congress party finally appointed one-time PDP (People's Democratic Party) minister Tariq Hamid Karra as its president for the union territory. Insiders say that all was set for the reappointment of former J&K unit president Ghulam Ahmad Mir when Rahul Gandhi named Karra. 

Now that a seat-sharing agreement is in place, however, it's possible that the Congress will show some vigour. Rahul Gandhi’s interaction with Kashmiri women on Monday went down well—even with some BJP supporters! 

Militancy Dampener 

On the other hand, although it is possible that the BJP may revive strongly in the Jammu region over the next month, the party has its work cut out.

In fact, the huge spurt in militant violence across the Jammu region, and in Kashmir too, could increase the already high levels of disgruntled alienation from the ruling party. 

Citizens in the Jammu region have been disillusioned with regard to the grand promises that accompanied the constitutional changes of 2019 when Ladakh was separated from Jammu and Kashmir and both portions were reduced to union territories. 

A host of benefits were meant to have followed, not least of which was the promised end to violence. Instead, violence has spurted vigorously across the Jammu belt since the very moment the Modi government was sworn in for a third time in early June. The violence appears ceaseless, and the future is bleak. 

The Jammu division’s deep disappointment was offset in 2019 by the patriotism that was set off by the Pulwama terror attack and subsequent events, but it grew even deeper during Modi’s second term.  

(The writer is the author of ‘The Story of Kashmir’ and ‘The Generation of Rage in Kashmir’. He can be reached at @david_devadas. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)