Ashutosh Bhardwaj 
Of the many ways to decode Tuesday’s election results in Haryana and Jammu & Kashmir, one is through the parties with which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has formed the government in a post-poll alliance in the past. It joined hands with Kashmir’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in 2014 and in Haryana, with the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) in 2019. Both the parties have been decimated this year. The JJP that had got 10 seats and nearly 15% votes in 2019 has now drawn an absolute zero with its vote share less than 1%. Similarly, Mehbooba Mufti’s PDP, which was the single largest party in the 2014 elections, with 22.67 votes% and 28 seats, could manage only three seats and less than 9% votes this time.
In Kashmir, the voter not only rejected the BJP, it also loudly stood against a party that had formed an alliance with the BJP.
Although the BJP registered its best performance in Jammu & Kashmir, the fact remains that all its 29 seats are limited to the Jammu region alone. Of the 43 seats in Jammu, six were created after the delimitation exercise carried out in 2022. As anticipated, the saffron party became the biggest beneficiary of delimitation in Jammu. Politically speaking, the biggest party in Jammu will not have any representation in the new government, a development that may further widen the rift between the two regions, as well as intensify the existing resentment of the people of Jammu.
Kashmir is among the BJP’s oldest agendas, the site of its political laboratory. The party went to polls following the lofty claim of restoring peace to the valley. It created and supported several small groups in the valley and funded them over the last five years. At a time when the National Conference (NC) and PDP leaders continued to be detained, the BJP carved out space for these new entrants into its ranks, providing them offices, swanky vehicles and security guards.
All of this couldn’t persuade it to contest on a single seat in the valley during the Lok Sabha elections, and only contested on 19 seats in the assembly elections. It didn’t win even one.
The Kashmir campaign was marked by conversations around the entry of Jamaat-e-Islami into the electoral field after nearly four decades, the dominance of independent candidates and the buzz around Engineer Rashid and his party. The streets of Srinagar and Pulwama were rife with the speculations about the ‘BJP proxies’, but the voters gave a decisive verdict against the BJP.
Significantly, key among the BJP’s strategies was to expand its base among the Gujjar-Bakarwals, the tribal communities who profess a Muslim faith but assert an identity distinct from Kashmiri Muslims. In an apparent attempt to pitch Muslims against Muslims, as many as nine seats were reserved for scheduled tribes (STs) in the new delimitation exercise. There too the BJP didn’t win a single seat.
The Jammu and Kashmir results mark the rejection of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise of a new polity in the erstwhile state after the reading down of Article 370.
On the other hand, the Congress has a lot to worry about in both the states. Not only has the BJP defeated it in Haryana, the grand old party could secure a mere six of the 32 seats it had fought in J&K, half of the 12 it had won in 2014. While the party did increase its vote share in Haryana from 28% percent to over 39%, nearly the same as BJP’s vote share this year, it couldn’t convert this increase into seats.
Furthermore, in a repeat of Punjab and Madhya Pradesh, the Congress was rife with bitter divisions within its ranks even in Haryana, with the Bhupinder Hooda and Kumari Selja camps at odds with each other. While the party had not declared any official chief ministerial candidate, posters of ‘abki baar Hooda sarkaar’ dominated the campaign trail. The over-dependence on Jat votes resulted in Hooda’s dominance over the ticket distribution and the subsequent electoral management. Imagine the disenchantment after he was trounced in his bastions – he lost all four seats in Panipat and five of the six seats in Sonipat.
If there was one state for the Congress to win, it was Haryana. A direct fight with the BJP, with little space for a vote split. The state had seen visible anti-incumbency, protests by farmers and wrestlers, unhappiness over the Agniveer scheme, and yet the BJP managed to retain it.
The Congress snatched half of the 10 Lok Sabha seats from the BJP just a few months ago. Several states in the last decade have shown that while a non-BJP party may win the assembly elections, voters tend to choose the BJP for the Lok Sabha. Haryana has reversed this trend.
If the loss in Kashmir will considerably weaken the party’s case in the Union Territory, a resounding victory of an incumbent government in a Hindi heartland state could boost the BJP’s prospects in the upcoming elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.