After what Jammu & Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah described as a “comprehensive” rout of the National Conference-Congress alliance in the State in the Lok Sabha elections, it was only a matter of time before the two parted ways. The alliance’s perceptible failure to connect with the people of the State where it has ruled since 2009, the allegations of corruption and the all-too- apparent governance deficit were responsible for the defeat. It lost in all six seats, while the People’s Democratic Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party won three each. In their search for scapegoats, the alliance partners blamed each other. The National Conference (NC) believes it was done in by the UPA government’s hanging of Afzal Guru. The Congress blamed its partner for eroding the Hindu vote bank in Jammu by invoking the spectre of secession on the issue of Article 370. The NC-Congress relationship has always been a chequered one, rarely sustained in adversity. Whenever the two parties have come together, it has been more of an understanding between the Abdullahs and the Gandhis, and the arrangement has rarely found favour with the two parties at the State level. In fact, the State’s two main Congress leaders, Saifuddin Soz and Ghulam Nabi Azad, who disagree on almost everything else, were for long in agreement that the coalition had become a liability for the Congress. After the 2010 stone-pelting agitation in the Valley, the State’s Congress leadership had strongly recommended withdrawal of support to the Omar Abdullah government.
Now that the split has taken place, both parties claim to be the first to have walked away, even though the usefulness of this as a political tactic is questionable. Anti-incumbency was much in evidence during the parliamentary elections, prompting Chief Minister Abdullah to roll out a series of measures aimed at winning back the confidence of the people immediately after the rout — SMS services on prepaid mobile phones, banned since the stone-pelting agitation, were restored; the retirement age of government employees was raised from 58 to 60 years, and all temporary recruitments were regularised. A desperate Mr. Abdullah has also given out his e-mail address asking people to send their grievances to him directly. With a resettlement plan for Pandits who fled the Valley when militancy began and still live in squalid camps in Jammu, he is also wooing the BJP’s constituency. At the moment, the PDP, fresh from its Lok Sabha gains, is already exuding the confidence of a winner. No doubt, it expects to benefit from the NC-Congress split. But the Assembly elections are still four months away, which is a long time in politics anywhere, and especially in Jammu & Kashmir.