Srinagar: The assembly election in Jammu and Kashmir has thrown up a decisive mandate for the INDIA bloc with Kashmiri voters predominantly casting their ballot in favour of the alliance’s candidates, while the Jammu region, the Hindu heartland of the Union territory, voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) again.
According to Election Commission (EC) data, the National Conference (NC) emerged as the single largest party on Tuesday (October 8) by winning 42 of the 90 seats that were up for the electoral contest in the Union Territory.
The Congress, however, faced a near rout in Jammu where it won just one seat in Rajouri district while in Kashmir the party won five seats, taking its total tally to six.
The alliance has a comfortable majority with 48 seats in the 90-member assembly. However, J&K lieutenant governor Manoj Sinha, the BJP-led Union government’s appointee, retains the power to nominate five more members with voting rights.
Also read: How Nominated MLAs Could be Advantageous to BJP in J&K Assembly in Case of Hung Verdict
If the INDIA bloc had fallen short of the magic number and Sinha moved ahead, the nominees could have complicated its efforts to form a government.
However, political analysts believe that the INDIA bloc would still have crossed the halfway mark with the support of smaller parties and independent candidates, some of whom were previously affiliated with the two parties but decided to throw their hats into the electoral ring after they were denied a mandate.
The list includes the NC’s Shabir Ahmad Kullay and Muzaffar Ahmad Khan, who won from the Shopian and Thanamandi constituencies respectively, and Choudhary Mohammad Akram and Satish Sharma, previously rejected by the Congress, who are elected to the assembly from Surankote and Chhamb.
The Peoples’ Democratic Party’s (PDP’s) youth president Waheed Parra on Tuesday also hinted at supporting the INDIA bloc for “addressing the issues” that have arisen in J&K after the abrogation of Article 370.
The PDP won only three seats in Kashmir, with Rafiq Ahmad Naik clinching Tral by a margin of a mere 460 votes, while party president Mehbooba Mufti’s daughter Iltija Mufti lost to the NC’s Bashir Ahmad Veeri.
The INDIA bloc could also reach out to the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP’s) Mehraj Malik, who defeated the BJP’s Gajay Singh Rana from the Doda assembly constituency in Jammu. This is the AAP’s first electoral victory in J&K.
Despite the scare caused by his defeat in the Lok Sabha election from the Baramulla constituency, NC vice-president Omar Abdullah, who seems set to lead the Union territory as its first elected chief minister, won from both the central Kashmir constituencies of Budgam and Ganderbal.
Omar thanked voters for giving him the opportunity to serve them.
“It was a mission of some parties to destroy the National Conference,” he said, obliquely pointing to the BJP. “But those who had come to the [electoral] arena to destroy us have perished themselves. Now our responsibility has increased. We have to repay the trust of the voters.”
With the NC in the lead, the INDIA bloc swept the capital Srinagar by winning all eight assembly constituencies. J&K Apni Party president Altaf Bukhari, a BJP ally, lost from the city’s Chanpora assembly constituency to Mushtaq Guroo, the political advisor of NC president Farooq Abdullah.
Tariq Hamid Karra, the newly appointed chief of the J&K Pradesh Congress Committee, also won from Srinagar’s Shalteng constituency where Rahul Gandhi, the leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha, had addressed a rally in the run-up to the election.
J&K’s oldest political party also seems to have made inroads into north Kashmir, where its candidates were elected from ten of 16 seats, while People’s Conference (PC) president Sajad Lone was the only winning candidate from his party.
Lone barely managed to win North Kashmir’s Handwara with an edge of 662 votes.
Imran Reza Ansari, an influential Shia cleric, former J&K minister and the PC’s general secretary, lost to the NC’s Javaid Riyaz by 603 votes.
The NC also put up a good fight in south Kashmir, the PDP’s stronghold, where it won ten out of 15 seats in the four districts of Kulgam, Anantnag, Shopian and Pulwama.
Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader M.Y. Tarigami managed to retain his bastion of Kulgam by defeating Sayar Ahmad Reshi, the Jamaat-e-Islami candidate, with a margin of 7,838 votes.
The participation of the Jamaat and the Awami Ittehad Party (AIP) led by Engineer Rashid, who is facing terror funding charges, doesn’t seem to have impacted the outcome of the election to a great extent in the Kashmir valley.
Kalimullah Lone, son of former Jamaat leader Ghulam Qadir Lone who had held talks with the BJP-led Union government, secured the fifth position in the Langate constituency with a mere 3,535 votes, significantly trailing behind the winning candidate and AIP chief Rashid’s brother Khursheed Ahmad Sheikh, who garnered 25,984 votes.
Lok Sabha MP Rashid’s party, however, failed to open its account elsewhere in Kashmir, even though it had put up a spectacular show in the 2024 parliamentary election, throwing cold water on the BJP’s plans to return to power in J&K.
Across the Jawahar tunnel, the BJP, which engineered the social and political demographics of J&K after the abrogation of Article 370 by extending a series of new rules and laws to the Union territory, managed to hold on to its stronghold of Jammu, the Dogra heartland of J&K, from where it won 29 seats.
Among these, four BJP candidates won with a margin of 2,000 votes or less, including Shagun Parihar, who defeated the NC’s Sajjad Ahmad Kichloo from the Kishtwar assembly constituency in Chenab Valley with a lead of 521 votes.
J&K BJP president Ravinder Raina lost to the NC’s Surinder Kumar Choudhary, a that which was correctly predicted by the NC vice-president ahead of the election.
