Jehangir Ali 
Srinagar: The delimitation of J&K’s electoral constituencies may not have helped the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) consolidate support for its candidates in some Jammu constituencies where the party was hoping to make inroads in this assembly election, according to an analysis of the election data by The Wire.
Jammu-based author and senior political commentator Rekha Chowdhary said that the redrawing of J&K’s electoral boundaries in 2022 increased Jammu’s legislative strength from 37 to 43 seats but it didn’t help the BJP electorally in a significant way.
Post delimitation, three new seats were carved out of four districts of Samba, Udhampur, Jammu and Kathua. These districts make up the Hindu belt of J&K – BJP’s core vote bank in Jammu. The delimitation exercise increased the number of assembly segments in these four districts from 21 to 24.
However, the saffron party seems to have staged a repeat of its 2014 assembly poll performance. Even though the three new seats created by the delimitation commission helped the party in emerging as the second largest in J&K assembly election, it lost Bani and Chhamb assembly segments in the Hindu belt.
Beyond its stronghold, the party’s electoral arithmetic crumbled in Pir Panjal region and Chenab valley of Jammu division with the loss of one seat in Rajouri district where the party’s J&K president Ravinder Raina suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the National Conference (NC).
One seat each was carved by the delimitation commission in Doda and Kishtwar districts of Chenab Valley, taking the strength of the region in the assembly from six to eight. But the addition of these seats also doesn’t seem to have favoured the saffron party, which was restricted to its 2014 tally of four seats.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and an independent candidate bagged one seat each from Doda and Kishtwar districts while the BJP candidates in Kishtwar barely managed to sail ashore with thin vote margins over their NC rivals.
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“More than delimitation, it looks like the BJP’s ground work and the ability to rally its vote bank, coupled with the failure of Congress which abandoned Jammu completely in this election, helped the party in retaining its mass support in the Hindu belt,” Chowdhary said.
Noor Ahmad Baba, former dean of social science at the University of Kashmir, said that the mandate in J&K showed that voters had exhibited “clarity of mind” with the BJP emerging as a “purely Hindu party” while the NC got representation in both regions of the Union Territory.
Out of 11 assembly segments in Jammu district, the BJP managed to increase its 2014 tally of nine seats to 10 in the recently held assembly elections with the help of Nagrota segment from where former NC leader Devinder Singh Rana was elected, this time on the BJP mandate. Independent candidate Satish Sharma won Chhamb assembly segment which was in the BJP’s tally in the 2014 assembly polls.
In Samba, where the BJP had won both the assembly segments in the 2014 polls, the addition of a new seat by the delimitation commission benefitted the saffron party. The commission had reserved Ramgarh segment in Samba for Scheduled Caste candidates but experts argued that the issue of ‘caste’ was not a factor in Jammu.
“The voting trends suggest that the SCs voted for BJP in 2014 which helped the party in winning all the SC reserved seats this election also,” Chowdhary, former professor in the political science department at the University of Jammu, noted.
The number of assembly constituencies increased in Udhampur district post delimitation from three to four seats, of which the BJP had bagged two seats in 2014 election while one seat was won by Pawan Kumar, an independent candidate. This time, the saffron party won all four seats, with Kumar retaining Udhampur (renamed Udhampur West) for the BJP.
“The party’s performance is consistent with the recent voting trends in the Hindu belt. There’s nothing new or surprising about it. The delimitation doesn’t seem to have worked for the party in a significant way as it had hoped,” she said, adding that the party has succeeded in consolidating its base among all Hindus.
In Kathua district, where the seats increased from five to six, the saffron party, which lost Bani assembly constituency to an independent candidate, was restricted to its 2014 score.
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Chowdhary said that the BJP’s expansion in J&K coincided with the outbreak of insurgency in the early 1990s. At the turn of the century, the Jammu State Morcha also emerged as a Jammu-based party, demanding separate statehood for Jammu, which competed for the same electorate in the Hindu belt and the saffron party won only one seat.
The party’s fortunes however started to shine after the 2008 Amarnath land row, which pitted the Muslim-majority Kashmir against the Hindu belt of Jammu. Riding the communal tensions in the erstwhile state with some Hindu rightwing groups, the BJP won 10 out of 21 assembly constituencies in the Hindu belt with a vote share of 26.74%.
In the 2014 assembly polls, the BJP’s vote share doubled to 50.23%, when it won 18 out the 21 seats in the Hindu belt, with the final tally of 25 seats propelling the party to power for the first time in the Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir in a coalition government with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
In Pir Panjal region’s Rajouri and Poonch districts, which were merged with Anantnag Lok Sabha constituency by the delimitation commission, the saffron party struggled to make inroads in this election. The 2022 exercise added an extra assembly segment to Rajouri district’s tally of four seats.
Ahead of the assembly election this year, the Pir Panjal region was turned into a theatre of ambitions for the saffron party which attempted to perpetuate a political divide in the twin districts in the run up to the controversial decision of the BJP-led union government to grant tribal status to Paharis, a linguistic minority of J&K.
Out of seven seats in the twin districts, the BJP had won two seats in Rajouri in the 2014 polls. However, the party suffered a drubbing this election, with the stunning defeat of J&K BJP president Raina, who lost his Nowshera seat in Rajouri district to the NC’s Surinder Kumar Choudhary, reducing the party to just one seat in the region.
Senior tribal leader and one of the BJP’s most prominent faces in Pir Panjal, Mushtaq Ahmad Bukhari, who unsuccessfully contested this election from Surankote, passed away before the results were declared.
Baba said that a narrative was circulated in mainland Jammu and New Delhi that Kashmir was a segregated society, “This election has busted the myth that the problems in Kashmir only existed because of a tiny minority among the Sunni Muslims.. With the Jammu region polarised, the BJP resorted to the politics of appeasing minority groups like Shias, Paharis and others but the policy miserably failed to yield any electoral dividends,” he said.
In Chenab valley districts of Ramban, Kishtwar and Doda, which used to send six representatives to the assembly, the delimitation commission increased the number of assembly segments to eight.
While the BJP had won four of these six seats in the 2014 polls, its tally remained the same this election with party candidates Shagun Parihar from Kishtwar and Sunil Sharma from Padder-Nagseni assembly constituencies defeating their NC rivals Sajad Kichloo and Pooja Thakur with just 521 and 1,546 votes respectively.
In Doda district, the extra seat added by the delimitation commission was won by AAP candidate Mehraj Malik while the other two seats in the district were retained by the BJP. In Ramban district, where the BJP had won one out of two seats, the party failed to open its account in this election.
Baba said that that the vote in Jammu and Kashmir reflected a degree of disapproval of what has been done by the political dispensation in New Delhi to the Union Territory since 2019, “Voters have largely reposed faith in a party which promised to remain committed to the secular ideals of Jammu and Kashmir,” he said.