Even as the Peoples Democratic Party maintained that the rout of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the national capital would have no impact on the government formation process in Jammu and Kashmir, party patron Mufti Mohammad Sayeed on Tuesday urged the BJP not to ignore the message of voters in Delhi, and called the results a “course correction call” for the BJP.
Mr. Sayeed, who congratulated Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal for his success, said: “Prime Minister Narendra Modi must take the lead in disciplining these elements who had started conveying a different idea of India, so that the country forges ahead along its ethos of tolerance, diversity and communal harmony.”
PDP’s spokesperson Naeem Akhter, however, told The Hindu : “We stand exactly where we were. These results have no impact on our talks with the BJP and government formation in the State.”
Calling the Delhi poll results “electoral anarchy,” Mr. Akhter said it had become impossible to understand the voters of today.
“I don’t think that Modi had done anything so bad in the past eight months to receive this kind of a dressing-down in Delhi. This is an inexplicable rout,” Mr. Akhter said.
After the hung verdict in the J&K Assembly elections, the PDP did not take the support offered by the Congress and the National Conference to form the government. The party, instead, engaged in parleys with the BJP and the RSS, which it had earlier accused of being “communal.” Several PDP leaders wanted to sit in the Opposition, but many others were afraid that if the party relinquished power, it would share the same fate as that of the Aam Aadmi Party.
“This time, we [PDP] have 28 seats, next time we won’t get even these many, which is what will happen to the AAP,” a senior PDP leader said after the J&K election results.
Now, with the AAP sweeping the elections in Delhi, several PDP leaders wonder if they took the right decision by not asking for a re-election soon after the divided mandate.
“We made the best possible decision we could under the circumstances, but yes, this overwhelming victory by the AAP is a complete surprise. Of course, it does make one wonder what if we had gone their way,” a former PDP legislator who lost the Assembly elections told The Hindu .
