The three-phased assembly elections concluded in Jammu and Kashmir earlier this week. The Valley is rife with expectations that their votes will be decisive (on 8 October) in reaffirming a complete repudiation of the Union government’s decision to annul J&K’s special status.
To be sure, the National Conference (NC), which is poised to bag a major share of votes, has already pledged that it will table a resolution condemning the revocation of Article 370.
But as things are shaping up, it looks like internecine political rivalries within Kashmir and the BJP’s systemic restructuring of J&K in the last five years of direct rule by the Modi government might come in the way, the results of the exit polls (released 5 October) notwithstanding.
Fractured Vote
Last week, the BJP high command in Delhi called 13 of its top leaders from J&K “to discuss the permutations and combinations” for the formation of the next government in the union territory, suggesting that the high-stakes battle on the BJP's side has begun.
The assembly elections in J&K took place amid widespread resentment over the scrapping of Article 370. Almost all Kashmir-based political parties acknowledge this reality. Yet the Valley remained riven by a kind of political disunity rarely witnessed before.
While the region's largest party, the National Conference (NC), has formed an alliance with the Congress party, they have left the like-minded PDP out. The latter has been at loggerheads with the NC throughout the election campaign.
At the same time, the Awami Ittehad Party’s (AIP) Sheikh Abdul Rashid' also known as 'Engineer' Rashid, a maverick politician from North Kashmir under detention at Tihar Jail since 2019, has supercharged local politics after his sudden release.
Rashid’s eccentric style of communication as well as his term as a prisoner charged (what people believe to be falsely so) under terrorism has enlarged his political profile and turned him into a hero of sorts. Drawing a massive crowd, his political campaigns have seen him railing against the PDP and the NC for what he alleges to be their “past blunders” which include alliances they separately made with the BJP.
Besides this, there are parties such as Altaf Bukhari’s J&K Apni Party (JKAP) and Sajad Lone’s People’s Conference (PC). While the former appears to have reconciled with the revocation of Article 370, the latter is very vehement about its reinstatement just like the NC, the PDP and Rashid’s AIP. Yet, none of them are willing to come aboard a common platform.
Add to this the participation of hundreds of candidates as independents. A staggering 40 percent of the total 908 candidates in the fray contested as independents, most of them in the Kashmir Valley. They include candidates backed by the banned Jamaat-e-Islami; Sarjan Barkati, another jailed political activist; Junaid Mattu, former Srinagar mayor, and more.
NC Has an 'Edge', Not a 'Wave'
As a result, voters appeared to have been unable to decisively rally around a single political formation, as was expected from them. The Quint travelled across 9 of the 10 districts in the Kashmir Valley throughout the three phases. of voting.
The picture that emerged was of a divided electorate with voters going for the representatives of their own choice, even though they all agreed that the votes were being cast against the decision to scrap Article 370.
“Every vote being cast here is against the abrogation,” Tariq Ahmad Mir, a voter from the Janbaazpora area of Baramulla district told The Quint on 1 October, the last day of polling. “This is the war of ideas. We are electing 90 legislators to the assembly and we want them to reflect our demands for the reinstatement of both special status and statehood.”
If there was any ‘wave’ of sorts, it was in favour of the National Conference. But to what extent will this ‘wave’ translate into fetching the party winnable numbers is uncertain. Most Exit Polls have predicted a clear win for the NC-Congress alliance but predict the BJP to emerge as the single largest party.
One thing was clear. The reason why the NC appears to have become the recipient of this windfall is because of its perceived ability to put up a united face against the BJP’s heavy-handed policy decisions in J&K.
At a polling station in Seelu village in North Kashmir, an interesting pattern was on display. During the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year, around 1924 votes out of a total of 3450 polled went to Engineer Rashid. But these votes were harvested as a part of the pro-Rashid wave that gripped the areas of North Kashmir as his sons joined the election campaign on the grounds that his victory would assure his release from prison. But in the assembly polls, that wave had all but dissipated.
“Rashid won’t do anything now,” said Khizr Muhammad Naikoo, a 75-year-old farmer from Seelu, who had previously voted for AIP. “Whichever party rules the Centre gets to pull all the strings here. I voted accordingly, keeping in mind the party that is best suited to represent my interests.”
Professor Noor Ahmad Baba, who formerly taught political science at the University of Kashmir, argued that voters cannot be faulted for the fragmentation of votes. “The situation imposed on Kashmir is such that it kept us away from politics and so the kind of maturity required to deal with the situation wasn’t yet fully there,” he said. “Political education comes through participation and mobilisation which has not happened for a very long time.”
Will BJP Surrender to Exit Polls?
Over the past five years, the BJP-led Centre took several measures that have stacked up enough odds against the political ambitions of regional parties. Chief among them is the delimitation which gave six additional seats to Jammu and only one to Kashmir.
Moreover, the seats that Jammu was awarded resized many constituencies in a manner that turned them into Hindu majority clusters. The Padder seat in Kishtwar is a case in point. This was clearly designed to benefit the BJP.
In a symbolic gesture of how the Union-controlled bureaucracy will continue to hold significant power at the altar of the elected administration, the J&K Directorate of Information and Public Relations (DIPR) - on the very day Exit Polls were released - announced a major review meeting scheduled for 10 October, without even waiting for the new government to take charge.
On Friday (4 October), another controversy erupted after former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah alleged that the senior most bureaucrat in the union territory, ie, the Cabinet Secretary, was given powers to change the ‘transaction of business rules’ which govern the government’s conduct in a union territory, with a view to further undermine chief ministerial powers and enhance those of the Centre-appointed Lieutenant Governor (LG).
“This information has come to me from within the Secretariat,” he tweeted, setting off a political storm in Kashmir where anxieties remain rife about the broad powers that the LG continues to enjoy. “Officers would be well advised to resist any pressure to further disempower the incoming elected government.” However, the Union Home Minister rejected these allegations as “misleading and speculative.”
This came in tandem with reports that the LG is also likely to appoint five nominated members to the J&K assembly. By virtue of the J&K Reorganisation Act 2019, the J&K LG already has the power to nominate two women to the assembly.
Last year in July, the Parliament passed the ‘Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation (Amendment) Bill, 2023’ that empowered the LG to nominate three more members to the assembly; two from the Kashmiri migrant community, and one member from the displaced persons community from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
The Indian Express reported on 5 October that since the J&K assembly was modelled on the lines of the Puducherry Assembly, the three nominated members will “function on par with elected MLAs and also have voting rights.”
This is likely to open the office of the LG to allegations of playing a partisan role should he decide to appoint all five members with a demonstrable bias towards the ruling party. In this changed scenario, the new halfway mark needed to form a majority will be 48, with the BJP required to marshal fewer MLAs than the other parties.
BJP Yet to Play Its Own Cards
This will be not the first time that Kashmir has become a site of such cut-throat political stratagems.
“Remember the District Development Council (DDC) experiment? One local party (JKAP) in an unofficial alliance with the BJP managed to poach winning members from the NC and the PDP and mustered support from independents to chair at least two (of the 10) DDCs in Kashmir,” said journalist and editor Anuradha Bhasin, referring to the 2020 local body elections that were marred by the allegations of irregularities.
After those polls concluded, there was intense horse-trading between the JKAP and other parties, with the rival politicians associated with the NC and the PDP alleging that the JKAP was being assisted actively by the J&K administration so that it could win over the winning members of other parties who had already been put under preventive detention. The JKAP had initially won only 12 seats, but using such tactics managed to take their toll to 20.
Bhasin said that the BJP continues to have the muscle power to wean away independents and break parties. “But the question is what will happen when the people’s hopes are dashed like that? This whole new structure is going to add to a lot of chaos,” she added.
Political observers in J&K also agree that despite the Exit Poll results, the BJP still had the wherewithal to stitch together a majority for itself.
“The BJP already has its allies in Kashmir. And the moment the old files (referring to dormant corruption cases) start to open, the more recalcitrant ones will follow,” said Mujeeb Masood, a Srinagar-based political activist. “Then, they also have the edge over these five nominated members. If the BJP emerges as the single largest party, it will be very difficult for them (the INDIA bloc) to form the government. The truth is that we cannot ignore the mandate of the people of Jammu.”
(Shakir Mir is an independent journalist. He has also written for The Wire, Article 14, Caravan Magazine, Firstpost, The Times of India and more. He tweets at @shakirmir. 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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