Why Kashmiri Political Parties Cannot Fight Each Other

When announcing the dates for Jammu and Kashmir’s assembly elections, chief election commissioner Rajiv Kumar told The Indian Express,  “We would (sic) assure all the required security to candidates, and facilities to the electors”.

I have not a shadow of a doubt that the EC will be true to Kumar’s word, and that Delhi will do everything in its power to vindicate his promise. But for Kashmir, and  India’s, future it is not just a fair conduct of the elections by the EC that matters but the way in which the concerned political parties decide to fight it. 

The fact that Rahul Gandhi and Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge have both gone to Kashmir to discuss election strategy for the J&K assembly election with the National Congress and the People’s Democratic Party, shows that the INDIA alliance, and the Congress in particular, is aware this election will not only decide the future of Kashmir, but also quite possibly, of India’s ethno-federal democracy as well.

To say that these elections are as important for both Kashmir and India as were the Jammu and Kashmir elections of 1987, would be an understatement.

1987 was a turning point for both Kashmir and India because while it created the first ever opportunity for a democratic opposition to the National Conference and the Congress to emerge in Kashmir, the way in which the Muslim United Front (MUF) was suppressed by the NC-Congress coalition immediately after the election triggered the first armed insurgency in Kashmir. 

This year’s elections are equally important because they are giving the same parties, the Congress and the National Conference, a chance to repair the damage they did in 1987. The threat this time is not external but internal – it comes not from Pakistan but from the BJP.

Put briefly, the danger that Kashmir now faces is that if Kashmir’s major parties continue with their present no-holds-barred competition with each other, and divide the Kashmiri vote, they will allow the BJP, which is certain to sweep Jammu, to emerge as the largest single party in the new state assembly. This will give it the right to form the next government. 

The rise of the BJP in Jammu has been dramatic. In 2002 its vote share in the  state elections was only 8.6% and it won only one seat in the J&K assembly. By 2008 its vote had risen to 11.28% and it won 11 seats. Six years later, in the next state assembly election in 2014, it won 25 seats and garnered 23.2% of the vote. Its share of the J&K vote in the parliamentary elections also doubled further  from 23% in 2014 to 46% in 2019 in the wake of the Pulwama tragedy, but fell back to 24% in 2024. 

This 24% was won almost entirely in the Jammu region, as was the 23% in 2014, and most of the 46% in 2019. These figures show that the political split between Jammu and Kashmir is now complete. With Ghulam Nabi Azad having left the Congress and formed his own party, the Democratic Progressive Azad Party, the BJP will face even less of a challenge in Jammu than it had in 2014 and 2019. It can therefore be confident of again winning the majority of the 43 seats allocated to Jammu after the recent delimitation of constituencies. In the recent general election, two of J&K’s five Lok Sabha seats went to the BJP, two to the National Conference, and one to an independent, Abdul Rashid Shaikh, a.k.a. ‘Engineer’ Rashid, a charismatic figure who fought as an independent from jail where he has been held for the last five years on allegations of ‘terror financing’ without being brought to trial.  

Not surprisingly, therefore, the BJP won both of its seats in Jammu. The National Conference won its two seats in central and southern Kashmir. The PDP won no seats, but Engineer Rashid swept Northern Kashmir, winning from Baramula by defeating not only former chief minister Omar Abdullah, but also Mir Mohammed Fayyaz of the PDP and Sajjad Ghani Lone, the leader of the J&K Peoples’ Conference. Rashid’s victory was so enormous that he garnered more votes than all the other three combined.  

If the BJP repeats its Lok Sabha performance in the coming assembly elections, it will find little difficulty in creating a majority coalition not only because it already has some allies in Kashmir like Sajjad Lone’s PC and Altaf Bukhari’s Apni Party, but because, thanks to its harvest from the now banned electoral bonds, it has both the money and the coercive power to secure some defections from the other major parties, and to entice other small parties and independents to join its coalition.  

Since the election will be held when Jammu and Kashmir is still a Union territory, and the Supreme Court has set no deadline for J&K’s conversion into a full state, there will be no one to oppose the ratification of the laws that this first-ever BJP-led government could enact. It will, therefore, hasten the end of Kashmiriyat in the state. 

But Kashmiriyat could well be only the first victim of Modi’s relentless drive to create a unitary Hindu Rashtra under his supremacy.  There are nine other states that have benefited from special safeguards for their ethnic identity under Article 371 of the constitution, eight of which are in the Northeast. What happens next in Kashmir is therefore likely to be seen as a precedent for his handling of ethno-national discontent in these states as well. 

Therefore, when Gandhi and Kharge speak to the Kashmiri leaders they will do well to remember that they are speaking not just for the Kashmiris, but for all the smaller ethno-regions of India. For should they fail to protect Kashmir’s ethnic identity, it will be seen by them as an unravelling not only of Kashmiriyat but a warning of what their fate could be if they dare to oppose Modi’s diktats in the future.