Srinagar: The nomination of the controversial Dogra leader Choudhary Lal Singh by the Congress from his home turf in the Jammu region for the upcoming assembly election is another stark reminder of how electoral calculations prevail over morality when it comes to politics in India.
The Congress has been forced to mend fences with Singh, a two-time Lok Sabha MP from the Udhampur constituency and three-time legislator from the Basohli assembly segment in Kathua district, because the party has lost many senior leaders in Jammu – its former stronghold – to its political opponents.
Former Congress leader and J&K minister Sham Lal Sharma joined the saffron party in 2019 while several middle-rung Jammu-based leaders joined former Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad’s nascent political outfit.
In 2022, the appointment of Vikar Rasool Wani as chief of the J&K Pradesh Congress Committee did little to slow down the erosion of the Congress’s political base in J&K.
Syed Amjad Shah, a senior Jammu-based political analyst and former journalist, said that the Congress wants to make a comeback in Jammu’s regional politics and that the upcoming assembly elections are crucial for the party even though the BJP has the upper hand in the Dogri-speaking belt in Jammu, Samba, Kathua and Udhampur.
He said that the Congress fielded Singh from Udhampur in the 2024 Lok Sabha election at a time when Azad had parted ways with the party and formed his own political outfit.
“Lal Singh was one of the main faces that was acceptable to everyone, even in the Muslim-majority valley, which is why he was given the mandate to contest the Lok Sabha election from Udhampur against the BJP’s Jitendra Singh,” Shah said.
The Congress has a battery of senior leaders in the Kashmir valley, but the party lacked leaders of a similar stature in Jammu who could challenge the BJP’s political agenda.
After parting ways from the BJP in 2018, Singh floated his own political outfit and vowed to fight the saffron party politically.
Soon, he started the movement for reclaiming ‘lost Dogra pride’, which quickly gained momentum. He even demanded a public holiday on the birth anniversary of Maharaja Hari Singh, the last Dogra ruler of the erstwhile J&K state, as well as a separate state for Jammu.
The movement gained mass support, marking the revival of Singh’s political career. He led massive motorbike rallies attracting the attention of people in Jammu’s Dogra belt.
“This indicates the growing influence of Singh in the All India Congress Committee and also puts an end to the propaganda of the BJP that the Congress discriminated against Jammu by joining hands with two dynastic families, i.e. the National Conference and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), and adopted a policy of appeasement,” Shah said.
Singh attained notoriety at the peak of a political crisis that broke out in J&K after a minor girl from the tribal Gujjar community was raped and murdered in Kathua’s Rasana village in 2018.
The Dogra leader found himself at a political crossroads when, as J&K’s forest minister, he joined a rally sponsored by the Hindu Ekta Manch, a saffron group, in support of the suspects in the Kathua rape-and-murder case along with J&K’s then-industries minister and senior BJP leader Chander Prakash Ganga.
That the floundering PDP-BJP coalition government’s own ministers were raising questions about the credibility of the police investigation into the sensational case, which was heavily loaded with communal overtones, became a huge embarrassment for then-chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, who finally saw Singh out of her cabinet.
An angry Singh almost immediately bid farewell to the saffron party after a four-year association.
For a year, Singh, a former student leader, was lost in the political wilderness until he popped back onto the political landscape with his Dogra Swabhiman Sangathan Party, naming his wife Kanta Andotra as its president ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha election.
In 2023, an educational trust run by Andotra was probed for financial irregularities by Union government investigation agencies, including the Enforcement Directorate (ED).
Singh termed the ED raid on his premises as a case of the saffron party pursuing a political vendetta against him.
The ED later arrested Singh in a money-laundering case but the courts later granted him bail.
Despite resentment against his public posture on the Kathua case and his frequent changes of heart, Singh was allowed to re-join the Congress in March this year.
The decision came after Jammu-based activist and lawyer Deepika Pushkar Nath, who had joined the Congress in 2021 as J&K spokesperson, quit in protest against the party’s allowing Singh to join Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra when it entered J&K last year.
Nath, who said she was leaving the Congress on “ideological grounds”, fought for justice for the eight-year-old Kathua victim and rigorously followed the case till the Supreme Court.
Earlier this year, a police case was also filed against Singh for allegedly misbehaving with a police team in Kalibari chowk in Jammu’s Kathua district on April 16.
Singh, who first served as a cabinet minister in J&K under the Congress-PDP coalition (2002-2008) regime headed by the late Mufti Sayeed, parted ways with the party ahead of the general election in 2014 after he was denied a ticket from Udhampur, a constituency he has represented in the 14th and 15th Lok Sabhas.
His dwindling fortunes soon began to shine when he joined the BJP in 2015 in the presence of Union home minister Amit Shah.
Singh was named J&K’s health minister after the PDP formed the coalition government with the saffron party and his clout continued to grow in Jammu.
Political analyst Shah said that the Congress had adopted a “soft-saffron policy” to compete with the BJP in the Jammu region after the saffron party – riding on the Modi wave – swept J&K’s Hindu belt in the 2014 assembly polls by winning 25 assembly seats, its highest ever tally in the country’s only Muslim-majority region.
The policy attempted to tap into the aggressive Hindutva sentiment in Jammu, but it failed to compete with the brazen majoritarianism preached by the saffron party and also did little to enhance the Congress’s political base.
“The Congress has moved back to being a secular force that believes in progressive politics without discriminating against anyone on the basis of religion. Singh is an ideal candidate to project that face of politics,” Shah added.
