In LS polls, Kashmir voted against scrapping Art 370. Does BJP stand a chance in assembly election?

The Lok Sabha election results on June 4 saw the National Conference (NC) emerge as the big winner in Kashmir, with the party being able to corner a majority of the votes. Its candidate from South Kashmir, Mian Altaf, scored the maximum votes (more than 5.26 lakh) for any participant in the fray in the Valley.

The party was also able to bag Srinagar with Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi receiving more than 3.56 lakh votes. While Altaf, a five-time MLA, commands spiritual authority over the nomadic tribe of Gujjars, Mehdi is a senior Shia leader.

The only setback the NC faced was when party chief and former chief minister Omar Abdullah decided to contest from North Kashmir, where Budgam — the stronghold of Mehdi — is located. Here, Engineer Rashid, an independent candidate who is currently in jail over allegations of terror funding, won the seat, defeating his high-profile rival with a margin of more than 2 lakh votes. His victory is significant given that he is a firm advocate of autonomy for Kashmir.

While the Lok Sabha polls in Jammu and Kashmir were important for many reasons, it was mostly seen by many as a referendum on the 2019 decision to scrap Article 370 by the central government. But the results have gone against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been desperately trying to make political inroads in the Valley.

Local politicians, in turn, were able to rally voters against the saffron party by centering their political speeches around the questions of regional identity.

“The kind of political forces that BJP wanted to promote after 2019 were not able to take off,” says Noor Ahmad Baba, retired professor of political science at Central University of Kashmir, referring to a clutch of parties that have been tagged as “proxies” for the BJP. “It is clear that the elections have actually managed to reimpose faith in those very forces that have championed the autonomy discourse.”

Will this also hold true in the assembly polls, which are looking increasingly imminent for the Union territory (UT)? Last week, the Election Commission (EC) said it has decided to accept applications seeking allotment of ‘common symbols’ from registered unrecognised parties with immediate effect. This is significant because registered unrecognised political parties have to apply for a ‘common symbol’ six months prior to the end of the term of a House.

New power centres in Valley

J&K has been seeing a rise of new power blocs since 2019. One of the first was Altaf Bukhari, a former People’s Democratic Party (PDP) leader, who deserted the party to create his own formation, J&K Apni Party. Former Union minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, in 2022, also followed suit by launching his outfit, the Democratic Progressive Azad Party after resigning from the Congress.

Although Sajad Lone’s People’s Conference is not new, the separatist-turned-mainstream politician has also grown increasingly assertive in the past five years, attracting high-profile leaders from old formations like the PDP. These new parties have also grooved well with the political messaging of the BJP, which has routinely slammed parties like the NC and PDP for being “dynastic” and “exploitative”.

For instance, while addressing a rally in Srinagar in February, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said that the people in J&K “had to bear the brunt of dynastic politics for decades”. He said that the existing parties were “only concerned about their families, not about your interests, your families”.

Several weeks before the Lok Sabha polls, Union home minister Amit Shah had also appealed to the voters across Kashmir — where the BJP abstained from fielding any candidates — to vote for any party other than the NC, PDP and Congress, indicating that they had the tacit support of the saffron party.

Refiguring the political calculus

It’s no secret that the Lok Sabha polls were held against a complex and challenging backdrop. Since the revocation of Article 370, experts say that the BJP-led Centre has completely overhauled the entire legal apparatus of the erstwhile state. As many as 800 central laws have become applicable to the former state after 2019 and 164 state laws were reapplied after amendments.

“The entire legal structure was literally dismantled,” says Sheikh Showkat Hussain, former head of the department of legal studies at the Central University of Kashmir.

As part of this reconfiguration, the government also redrew the electoral constituencies of J&K in a process called ‘delimitation’, in which the parliamentary seats of the region were rearranged.

For instance, the Poonch and Rajouri segments, previously part of the Jammu Lok Sabha seat, were clubbed with the Anantnag seat in Kashmir. Parts of Budgam constituency in central Kashmir were attached to Baramulla seat, and the entire district of Pulwama and some parts of Shopian in south Kashmir were added to the Srinagar seat.

Local politicians allege that the process was an act of “gerrymandering” — to favour one party or class — that was aimed at disrupting the traditional political arithmetic in the region, while influencing electoral outcomes favourable to the BJP.

The delimitation process, for instance, led to the addition of around 7.35 lakh new voters to Anantnag constituency, a majority of which are

Paharis spread across the regions of Poonch and Rajouri that the BJP had hoped to woo by awarding them scheduled tribe (ST) status.

According to Rekha Chowdhary, former professor of political science at the University of Jammu, Shah’s statement prior to the polls that the BJP will wait for “lotus to bloom in Kashmir” and aspires to “win the hearts” of people suggested it was not in a hurry. “It was also a candid acknowledgement that the party still has to build its support base in Kashmir,” she adds.

How would they go about it now? The BJP’s Kashmir spokesperson, Altaf Thakur, says the party will try and win the masses over by ushering in more economic development, more industries and building new infrastructure to cater to the increasing tourist inflow.

“That’s how we aspire to make our party agenda resonate with the people,” he says. “And the Union home minister has already made it clear that BJP will indeed contest the assembly polls from Kashmir.”

Can assembly polls deliver a surprise?

All these new developments have made the political space in Kashmir a fiercely competitive one. EC data reveals that the party which has the largest number of leads in the assembly segments is the NC (34), followed by the BJP (29) and Engineer Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party (14).

These figures also appear to suggest that Kashmir-based political groups are likely to have an upper hand in the assembly polls. But Chowdhary believes it is not necessary that these trends will hold.

“Each election has its own logic. The assembly elections are going to be more competitive and more complex than Lok Sabha polls. There will be multiple candidates fighting for multiple constituencies. It will definitely be centred on localised issues,” she says.

At present, much of the regional political discourse has centred around issues such as high unemployment, which is at 18.3% in J&K; awarding mining contracts to non-local bidders, and waving off 20% tariff on imported apples, which has made the Kashmiri variant expensive, infuriating the farmers.

Traditional leaders like Omar and Mehbooba, too, have already declared that they won’t contest the assembly polls as they don’t want to be chief ministers in a UT.

This means that the party elected to power will field a mid-level functionary as the chief ministerial candidate as a mark of protest, because as long as J&K remains a UT, its powers will be truncated, with the levers over bureaucracy and police firmly lying with the Centre.

“In light of the 2024 LS verdict, the government may be required to soften its position. Restoration of statehood can be a great step to begin with,” says Hussain. “Giving people a sense of participation is eventually what’s going to make assembly polls meaningful and effective.”