Elections Are Not a Morality Play

The announcement of the long-overdue Assembly elections has shaken up Kashmir’s political scene. The three phase exercise has sent political parties scrambling to put their house in order and field the right candidates. It has also brought about a familiar spectacle of the known political turncoats engaging in one more round of this unedifying practice. They don’t bother to even put up a pretense of any political ideology or conviction. Should one expect them to stand for any worthwhile cause in power? The answer is anybody’s guess.  The parties have also started poaching on their rivals. Almost everyday, groups of ground-level political workers are shown switching sides. In an election season, however, these activities are par for the course. More so, in Kashmir which is witnessing an Assembly election after a decade. 

That said, in the first flush of the election campaign, some important developments have taken place which have the potential to alter the outcome. The National Conference and the Congress have entered into an alliance.  Under the terms of the agreement, the two parties have finalized a seat-sharing agreement on all 90 seats in the union territory, leaving, however, one seat to the CPI(M)’s M Y Tarigami, who will contest from his South Kashmir hometown Kulgam.  The NC will fight on a predominant majority of 47 seats in Kashmir Valley and the Congress will contest a  lion’s share of 43 seats in Jammu. This, the parties expect, will ensure that the votes are not split which would give advantage to the BJP, a force to reckon with in Jammu division – that is,  despite some recent disaffection in the region with the saffron party’s policies. 

The Congress-NC alliance leaves out the PDP which otherwise is a member of the INDIA bloc. This is believed to have been done at the urging of the NC which doesn’t want the PDP further nibble away at its Valley share of seats. But this also leaves the PDP free to contest on all seats in the UT. The party could especially be a challenge in South Kashmir which remains its stronghold. In the District Development Council polls in 2020, the PDP had won 27 seats while the NC had secured 67. 

Another consequential development is the re-appointment of the senior BJP leader Ram Madhav as the party’s co-poll incharge  along with Union Minister G Kishan Reddy, for the Assembly elections. The advantage of Madhav, the architect behind the PDP-BJP ‘Agenda of Alliance’ in 2015,  is that he knows leaders across the parties and will thus be able to keep the lines of communication open with them until after the elections are over and the government formation begins. 

Incidentally, Madhav was also in Kashmir around the time Gandhi and Kharge were here. His appointment shows that like the Congress, the BJP may also be looking for alliance partners in the UT, more so in the valley. Although the saffron party is supposed to have an understanding with some local parties, none of them is willing to publicly acknowledge it for fear of losing public support. All these parties not just failed to win a single seat in the recent parliamentary elections but also couldn’t enthuse Kashmiri voters. In terms of vote tallies they finished last in the seats they contested from. 

But more than a pre-election alliance, Madhav could be expected to look at a post-election scenario. Should the BJP win a majority of seats in Jammu division, where it retains significant following despite a rejuvenated Congress making inroads recently, Madhav could be hoped to explore options with the parties in the Valley. 

The People’s Alliance for Gupkar Declaration (PAGD) is now a distant memory. It is as if it didn’t exist in the first place. The PAGD’s experience of fighting jointly during the District Development Council polls in 2020  didn’t encourage much confidence. The parties squabbled with one another over seat-sharing and later also fielded proxy candidates against each other. Though the PAGD still managed to win a majority of seats in the DDC elections, it left a bad taste among the partners. Soon after the elections were over, the People’s  Conference  led by Sajjad Gani Lone quit the PAGD  citing the issue of proxy candidates. Or so he claimed. 

Overall, the election holds interesting possibilities for Jammu and Kashmir. The NC expects to secure a majority of its own or atleast emerge as the largest single party. The BJP hopes to repeat the 2014 performance. In fact, with fresh delimitation giving it an edge in many more constituencies in Jammu, the party expects to even better  its 2014 tally of 25 seats. It is also possible that the re-energised Congress under Rahul would undercut the BJP in Jammu. In that case, the BJP would no longer be able to assert a role in the future elected government. That said, in the Valley, the NC could face a tough challenge from the PDP, which remains relevant and also from Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party.   The field as of now is wide open. 

• Views expressed in the article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the editorial stance of Kashmir Observer 

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