It Didn’t Make The Headlines, But BJP Is Now The Largest Party In Jammu And Kashmir

Jammu and Kashmir watchers and political pundits, without any exception, had thought it to be impossible, but it has happened. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has become the largest political party in the Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir state.

Today, the BJP has 25 members in the 87-member Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly (all from Jammu – 24 Hindu and one Gujjar Muslim), 11 members in the 36-member Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Council (one more than its ally, People’s Democratic Party), three members in the Lok Sabha (two from Jammu and one from Ladakh) and one member (from Jammu) in the Rajya Sabha. Members of the Lok Sabha are Jitendra Singh (MoS in PMO) and Jugal Kishore Sharma from Jammu and Rani of Ladakh Parvati’s son-in-law Thupstan Cheewang from Ladakh, and member of the Rajya Sabha is Shamsher Singh Manhas.

The BJP and its pre-poll ally, People’s Conference (PC) of separatist-turned-politician Sajad Lone, together have 27 members in the Legislative Assembly. The strength of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in the Legislative Assembly is equal to that of the BJP and the PC (27).

As for the remaining 15 seats in the Legislative Council, 14 are shared between the National Conference (NC) and the Congress. One seat is vacant. Till 10 November 2017, the BJP and the PDP had 11 members each in the Legislative Council. That day, the Chairman of the Legislative Council accepted the resignation of PDP MLC, Vikramaditya Singh, grandson of Maharaja Hari Singh and elder son of Congress veteran, Karan Singh. The result was that the PDP’s tally came down to 10. Vikramaditya Singh had resigned on three specific issues – discrimination with Jammu and the state government’s failure to deport Rohingya Muslims from Jammu and declare 23 September birthday of Maharaja Hari Singh, a state holiday. He was the first-ever law-maker in the state to resign from the state legislature.

As for the main opposition National Conference (NC) and the Congress, the former has 15 members in the Legislative Assembly, the lowest ever tally, and the latter has 13. As far as their presence in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha is concerned, the NC has one member in the Lok Sabha and the Congress has one in the Rajya Sabha. They are Farooq Abdullah and Ghulam Nabi Azad respectively. The PDP too has only one member in the Lok Sabha – Muzaffar Hussain Beig. It also has two members in the Rajya Sabha.

The BJP has not only established itself as a largest political party in the state legislature and the central legislature, but has also created another history of sorts by sweeping the Autonomous Hill Development Council polls in Leh district of the cold-desert Ladakh. It defeated the Congress on 24 October 2015. It won 17 of the 24 contested seats and the Congress’ tally came down from 22 in 2010 to a paltry four. The NC could win two seats and one seat was won by an independent candidate.

Before 2014, the BJP was considered only a marginal political player in the state having presence in some urban pockets of Jammu province, which returns 37 members to the Legislative Assembly and two to the Lok Sabha. It was termed as a “party of Kanak Mandi and Raghunath Bazar, Jammu”. It had no support-base whatsoever both in the predominantly Muslim Kashmir and Buddhist-majority Ladakh.

The BJP, which was formed in 1980 with Atal Behari Vajpayee as its first president, contested the assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir for the first time in 1983 and it drew a blank. It won no seat. It won a paltry two seats in 1987. In 1996, it won eight seats. Between 19 January 1990 and 9 October 1996, Jammu and Kashmir state remained under the governor/president’s rule because of the turmoil in the Kashmir Valley. The BJP suffered a massive defeat in the 2002 assembly elections. Its tally came down to just one from eight in 1996. In 2008, the BJP increased its tally from one in 2002 to 11. This election took place in the wake of the massive Amarnath land row (June-August) in Jammu, which had claimed at least 12 lives of young Hindus and also had resulted in serious injuries to hundreds of other Hindu agitators, all demanding the return of the snatched piece of land at Baltal in Kashmir to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board (SASB). The BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh were the two major players involved in the Amarnath land row.

However, it was in December 2014 that the BJP performed exceedingly well. As said, it won 25 seats and decimated the NC and the Congress, which together won 11 seats. One seat went to a BJP rebel candidate. It was the prestigious Udhampur seat and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had addressed a huge election rally in this second biggest town of Jammu province. The most striking aspect of the whole electoral battle that the BJP fought was that it did win 25 seats, but its vote-share fell by a whopping 10 per cent between May and December 2014. In the general elections, the BJP had got 32.5 per cent of the total popular votes polled in Jammu and Kashmir, which was one per cent more than the national average. Six months later in December, its vote-share was 22.5 per cent. This, despite the fact Prime Minister Narendra Modi campaigning extensively in Jammu province.

Why did the BJP lose so many votes in a short span of time? The general view was, and is, that the BJP had abandoned its age-old ideological plank – Article 370. The BJP had prepared its election manifesto, but it didn’t release it following a threat from Hina Bhat from Kashmir that she would pick up gun in case Article 370 was touched by the BJP. (This writer had prepared the election manifesto.)

Can the BJP replicate 2014 in 2019 during the general election and during the 2020 assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir? It’s difficult to answer this question at this point in time, notwithstanding the fact that an anti-BJP wave has been sweeping Jammu province since the formation of the PDP-BJP coalition government on 1 March 2015. It could replicate 2014 provided it succeeded in redressing the grievances of its core constituency in Jammu.

Grievances are many. Five of them, which need to be addressed forthwith, include acute unemployment problem, inadequate representation for Jammu youth in the professional and technical institutions, no or little say for Jammu in governance, preferential and differential treatment to Kashmiri Muslims and the fast-growing trust-deficit between the BJP and the people of Jammu province, especially six million Hindus, including Hindu refugees from Pakistan, Pakistan-occupied-Jammu and Kashmir and Kashmir Valley. Four other major issues which also have angered the people of Jammu province are the BJP’s ambiguous stands on Article 370, Article 35-A and Rohingya Muslims and New Delhi’s soft approach towards seditionists in Kashmir.