Srinagar: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) appears to have improved its marginal presence in Jammu & Kashmir, registering an average of almost 7% of the votes polled in each of the 19 of the 47 assembly constituencies in the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley where the saffron party was in the electoral fray, according to official data.
From an average of less than 2% votes per seat in the 2008 assembly election, its vote share has jumped to an average of 6.76% votes in the 19 constituencies where it had fielded candidates this time, according to the data released by the Election Commission of India (ECI).
In the 2008 assembly election, the BJP recorded an average vote share of 1.89% of total votes polled in 25 out of 46 assembly segments in Kashmir valley. The figure jumped to 3.89% in the 2014 assembly polls when the party contested on 34 assembly constituencies in the valley.
The ECI declared the result of the three-phase J&K assembly polls on Tuesday (October 8) with the INDIA alliance set to lead the first popular government in the Union Territory after the reading down of Article 370. While the BJP emerged as the second largest party in the assembly elections with 29 seats, it will have to stay in the opposition.
The National Conference (NC), led by Farooq Abdullah, bagged 42 seats while the Congress had to stay content with just six seats – five of which were won by the party in the Kashmir Valley.
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The victory of INDIA ally and Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader M.Y. Tarigami from South Kashmir’s Kulgam assembly segment has handed 49 seats to the bloc, allowing it to easily sail over the halfway mark of 46 seats in the assembly of 95 legislators – 90 elected and five nominated by lieutenant governor Manoj Sinha.
The nomination of five legislators had sparked a political row in Kashmir Valley ahead of the declaration of the poll results.
Even though the BJP has once again drawn a naught in the Muslim majority valley in these election, the party came very close to registering its first win after Faqeer Mohammad Khan, a senior political figure and the BJP candidate for Gurez assembly segment, nearly defeated his rival and senior NC leader Nazir Ahmad Khan. The Khan duo were separated by a thin margin of 1,132 votes after pocketing 7,246 and 8,378 votes respectively in the landlocked assembly constituency of North Kashmir.
However, political analysts reasoned that BJP’s performance in Gurez, where 97% of the population is Muslim, was driven mainly by its candidate’s personal rapport with the public instead of ground support for the party.
A former People’s Democratic Party (PDP) leader, Faqeer Mohammad Khan joined the BJP in 2020. He won from Gurez in the 1996 assembly elections as an independent candidate and later joined the Congress. Gurez constituency was won by NC in 2002, 2008 and 2014 assembly polls, which propelled NC’s Khan to the post of deputy speaker of J&K assembly.
In the capital Srinagar, Ashok Kumar Bhat, the BJP candidate for Habba Kadal, a former bastion of Kashmiri Pandits, was among the top performers for the party who came second in the downtown constituency with 2,899 votes or 15.08% of total polled votes. Bhat lost to senior NC leader Shamim Firdous who bagged 12,437 votes.
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Javed Ahmad Qadri, the saffron party candidate from South Kashmir’s Shopian assembly constituency, once a hotbed of separatist sentiment, also put up a fairly decent show in the assembly election by registering 6,895 votes or 11.6% of total polled votes. He was leading in the first seven rounds of counting but was defeated by his rival and winner, Shabir Ahmad Kullay, an independent candidate, who polled 14,113 votes.
The BJP’s young face in Kashmir and a favourite of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Aijaz Hussain, was also among the party candidates in the polling fray in Kashmir valley who managed to attract a fair share of voters, despite widespread anger against the BJP in the Muslim majority region over its Article 370 move.
According to the ECI data, Hussain polled 3,281 votes or 8.91% of total polled votes in Lal Chowk assembly segment of Srinagar district which was won by National Conference’s Sheikh Ahsan Ahmad who bagged 16,731 or 45.45% votes. INDIA bloc won all the eight seats in Srinagar district.
The BJP candidates in Rajpora and Kokernag assembly constituencies registered 10.44% and 7.26% of total votes polled in the two south Kashmir constituencies for which the election was held on September 18.
The saffron party also improved its performance in Karnah where its vote share went up from 2.52% in the 2014 assembly elections to 7.2% this year. In Anantnag, its vote share increased from 3.84% to 5.37% and Homshalibugh (renamed to Anantnag west) saw an increase from 5.35% to 10.61% in this election.
In the remaining constituencies of Kashmir, ECI data suggests that the BJP’s vote share has remained more or less stagnant since the 2008 assembly election.
