On September 18, the Indian Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) is scheduled to begin voting in three phases in elections for a new 90-member legislative assembly. The election is significant; it is the first time in a decade that J&K will vote in assembly elections.
Of the 90 constituencies, 47 are in the predominantly Muslim Kashmir valley and 43 in the Hindu-majority Jammu region.
While India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is expected to do well in its traditional stronghold of Jammu, the opposition INDIA bloc is the frontrunner in the valley. Two INDIA member parties — the Congress party and the National Conference (NC), Kashmir’s largest pro-India party — reached a seat-sharing agreement last week.
Three weeks before voting, with no party or alliance set to dominate Jammu and Kashmir and with several constituencies seeing multi-cornered contests, J&K appears to be headed for a fractured verdict.
This is the second election to be held in J&K since its autonomy was revoked and statehood withdrawn on August 5, 2019.
The first was in April-May this year, when J&K voted along with the rest of India in parliamentary elections. The BJP did well in Jammu, winning both parliamentary seats there. Of the three seats in the valley, the NC won two, with the third going to an independent candidate Sheikh Abdul Rashid, better known as “Engineer Rashid,” who fought the elections from jail — the former legislator faces terrorism financing charges. Rashid’s victory against a formidable opponent, the NC’s Omar Abdullah, laid bare the subterranean support that separatist forces enjoy in the valley.
Apprehending a wipe-out in the Kashmir region, where opposition to the Narendra Modi government’s abrogation of Article 370 and its Kashmir strategy is strong, the BJP did not contest the parliamentary elections, but backed “proxy parties.” These suffered humiliating defeats.
In the upcoming assembly elections, the BJP is contesting some seats in the valley and is expected to back independent candidates. However, “it is unlikely to make inroads in Kashmir in the assembly election either,” a professor at the Kashmir University in Srinagar told The Diplomat. It will, however, do well in Jammu, although “it will find the going tougher than in the parliamentary election,” he said.
The BJP is facing internal turbulence over seat distribution, which could cost it some seats, especially in the context of a stronger challenge from a resurgent Congress and the Congress-NC alliance. Moreover, the serious deterioration in the security situation in Jammu — there has been an uptick in terrorist attacks in the region, including on civilians — has shaken the confidence of Jammuites in the BJP. Jammuites are also said to be upset with BJP decisions allowing “outsiders” to purchase land in J&K and the scrapping of the darbar move (the biannual shift from the summer capital, Srinagar, to the winter capital of Jammu and back), which has hit local businesses hard.
The seat-sharing agreement between the NC and Congress will see them contest 51 and 32 seats, respectively, across J&K. They will engage in a “friendly fight” in five constituencies (where no agreement could be reached). Two other INDIA bloc partners, the Communist Party of India-Marxist and the Panthers Party, will contest one seat each.
However, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), an INDIA bloc constituent, is contesting on its own. And despite the PDP’s weak position, it could take away some of the anti-BJP mainstream Kashmiri votes from the Congress-NC alliance. This could cost the latter some seats, especially in the context of multicornered contests in many constituencies.
An interesting and important development in the assembly elections is that separatists and Islamists, who stayed away from elections in the past, are contesting.
Enthused by Rashid’s spectacular victory in the parliamentary election, his supporters of the Awami Ittehad Party are fielding some three dozen candidates, many of whom could win. Then there is the Tahreeq-e-Awam, a party launched by former militants and separatist sympathizers. Among the prominent figures expected to contest is Ajaz Ahmad Guru, brother of Afzal Guru, who was hanged in 2013 for his role in the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament.
Additionally, several former members of the banned Jamaat-e-Islami, a former Islamist political party that is alleged to be the political wing of the Hizbul Mujahideen, J&K’s largest militant group, are contesting the assembly election as independent candidates. “They could win some seats in the Islamist heartland of Sopore and in south Kashmir, where the soft-separatist PDP enjoys some support,” the Kashmir University professor said.
With separatists and Islamists throwing their hats in the electoral ring, many constituencies will see multicornered contests. With the assembly elections “unlikely to throw up a clear winner, the door will be wide open for post-election horse-treading,” the professor said.
The possibility of current alliances and equations changing then cannot be ruled out. After all, J&K has seen governments of different permutations and combinations in the past. Parties with little ideological similarity or programmatic understanding have not hesitated to join hands.
Following the 2014 assembly elections, the PDP and the BJP, which won 28 and 25 seats, respectively, joined hands to form a coalition government. That coalition fell apart in 2018, when the BJP pulled the rug from beneath the PDP’s feet, leading to the collapse of the government. In the five years after the abrogation of Article 370, it was the PDP that suffered the most as a result of the Modi government’s systematic weakening of Kashmiri parties.
The NC too has allied with the BJP in the past. It was part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government led by Atal Behari Vajpayee at the center. The Congress and NC may be allies in this assembly election, but they have had a complex and turbulent relationship in the past — friends during one era and bitter foes in another.
The BJP is determined to form the government in J&K. It has worked relentlessly and systematically over the past decade to weaken other political parties and politicians, gerrymander electoral boundaries to favor itself, and enact laws and adopt policies to cement the backing of its support base. A fortnight ago, the BJP leadership dispatched Ram Madhav to take charge of the party’s mission to form the next government in J&K.
An old “Kashmir hand,” Madhav was the man who stitched together the BJP-PDP alliance in 2014, enabling the BJP to form a government in J&K for the first time in history. Madhav is known to have close contacts with parties across the political and ideological spectrum in J&K and his services would prove handy in the likely event of the BJP not winning enough seats to form the next government.
The BJP will leave no stone unturned to ensure that it forms the new J&K government. It will be after the elections that the real power struggle in J&K will unfold.