As summer turns to autumn, the fields around Langate’s villages are golden with the sheaves of freshly harvested grain. Along the roads, there are more banners and posters than in most parts of Kashmir over the past month, for Langate’s is among the most keenly contested seats, a testing ground for a ploy that worked well just four months ago but is fading fast.
So much has changed from spring to late summer that, even in Langate, his pocket borough, enthusiasm for `Engineer’ Rashid has declined remarkably since the Lok Sabha election, when he won more than five lakh votes to take the Baramulla seat—defeating former chief minister Omar Abdullah and People’s Conference chief Sajad Lone. The pulsating heart of that campaign was Langate. He is now struggling to get his brother elected to the assembly.
The enthusiasm of spring was largely a sympathy vote for Rashid’s sons’ pleas that a vote for him would get their father out of Tihar Jail, where he was then locked up. Now that he is out on bail, in order to campaign, that enthusiasm is being replaced with suspicion, even in Langate—where Rashid won in 2008 and 2014, the last time elections were held.
Rashid-backed candidates are in the fray in most north Kashmir constituencies but are more often playing spoiler than likely to win. They are really in the contest in only Langate, Bandipora Sonawari, and Baramulla itself, but are unlikely to win any except possibly Langate.
Two factors are working for Rashid. One is geographical: the hilly, rocky Mawar region of the constituency, which has 29,000 of Langate’s approximately 120,000 voters. It is where Rashid has done the most work for people. So, he would expect Mawar to vote overwhelmingly for him.
Two, young voters remain his demographic advantage. Many older voters are suspicious of the circumstances of Rashid’s release from jail, and speculate that it’s a BJP ploy. Some of them point out that Rashid is not talking of a plebiscite this time around, which once used to be his pet theme.
Many young voters are less affected by this cynicism. They remain enthused about the chimeric possibilities that the long-jailed Rashid might represent. If the young vote in large numbers, they could see Rashid’s brother through to the assembly.
The Mir Junaid Factor
However, both keys have been blunted by the candidature of the youthful, cosmopolitan Mir Junaid. His charisma has attracted many younger voters, and civil works that he got done in the Mawar area could get him a chunk of even Mawar’s votes.
Junaid is a bright young mover and shaker who has amazing contacts among the powers that be—and he is immensely wealthy. That wealth has allowed him to run a high-profile campaign, concentrated around Langate town, from where he hails.
His campaign pitch has been mature and sensible, talking of restored statehood (pointing out that it has been promised by the prime minister and the home minister in Parliament), and raising human rights and other concerns of citizens.
One potent concern is that crimes (such as militancy) of relatives, including fathers, should not affect the prospects of young people who may have nothing whatever to do with those crimes. As things stand, young people are denied jobs and passports if a relative has in the past been associated with militancy—sometimes before the young citizen was born.
This is an issue across Kashmir, but more so in places like Langate, in the hilly, rocky, forested belts of which militants had a greater presence during the 1990s than in many other parts of the Valley. Langate itself is now a town, but was little more than a stop on the way from Baramulla to Handwara a quarter-century ago—a poor people’s stop that many avoided.
The Dark Horse
The second variable that could undermine Rashid’s party is the inclusion in the Langate constituency of an area that used earlier to be part of the Handwara constituency. That shift seemed to have been made during the recent delimitation to suit Sajad Lone in Handwara, for that belt traditionally voted for the National Conference.
However, Rashid’s main rival, Irfan Panditpuri of the People's Conference, says his party got a large number of votes from that belt even last time. Even those who voted for the NC might transfer their votes to the modernist Junaid, if not Panditpuri. For, the Congress candidate, representing the NC-Congress alliance, is trailing far behind the three leading candidates.
An interesting sidelight of Panditpuri’s campaign is that his banners and posters highlight his and his late father’s images. His father represented the area before Rashid unseated him by 0.67 per cent of the votes polled in 2008.
Although Panditpuri told me he would follow his party chief’s lead on which side to support in the new house, it is interesting to note that his campaign material does not highlight Sajad’s image.
Development and Nepotism are Poll Issues
Junaid offers the sobriety and modernity to which many youths respond well—albeit not yet a majority of Langate’s youth population. Yet, the substantial chunk of votes his mature but well-oiled campaign will garner could affect the outcome. He is denting the vote shares of both Sajad’s and Rashid’s candidates, but he himself acknowledges that he is doing greater damage to Rashid’s prospects.
Also operating against Rashid (apart from Junaid’s candidature and the shift of the Kandi area into Langate) are three issues. One, some voters hold against him the very fact that Rashid has put up his own brother. It smacks of the sort of dynastic/nepotistic politics which he once opposed.
The other issue, mainly among middle-aged and older citizens, is the suspicion about why Rashid is out on bail. The third issue is trends in development. For, although much developmental work was done in the Mawar region when Rashid was the area’s MLA, more roads, culverts and other civil works have come up in other parts of the constituency during the past three years.
This is the time during which Panditpuri has been president of the Kupwara District Development Board. Even in places where not everyone is pleased with the level of development achieved, the other two issues—why Rashid was given bail, and his putting up his own brother—are important issues.
Both candidates are strongly in the running, and Junaid’s robust showing may affect the outcome.
[This article was written after Author and Journalist David Devadas visited Langate last weekend before polling took place on Tuesday.]
(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.)
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