The Election Commission of India (ECI)’s announcement that Assembly elections will soon be held in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) has already recast mainstream politics in the Union Territory. Assembly elections were last held in the erstwhile State of J&K in 2014. Today, a region marred by three decades of conflict and separatist Hurriyat’s boycott politics is charting a new path with electoral politics and drawing new battle lines between regional and national political forces.
The manifestos of J&K’s two regional parties, the National Conference (NC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), reflect this change. Since the armed uprising in J&K in the 1990s, mainstream parties would focus on sadak, bijli, pani (road, electricity, water) during elections, leaving core ideological politics of aspirations and sentiment to the separatists. However, the Centre’s move on August 5, 2019, to end J&K’s semi-autonomous status and divide the State into two UTs (J&K and Ladakh) posed an existential crisis to the mainstream parties, forcing them to seek restoration of the rights that existed earlier. As a result, after many decades, the top leaders in J&K are looking inwards rather than at New Delhi.
J&K Assembly polls
In the NC’s manifesto titled ‘Dignity, Identity and Development’, NC president Dr. Farooq Abdullah spelled out the party’s new political direction, saying the path ahead is fraught with challenges. “Our identity has not only been questioned but systematically eroded,” he said. The NC has pledged to strive for the implementation of the Autonomy Resolution passed by the J&K Assembly in 2000, which seeks more powers in the region than what was enshrined in Article 370 until 2019. It hinted at the pre-1953 position when New Delhi exercised powers in the matters of defence, communication, and foreign affairs alone, while J&K retained the nomenclature of Sadr-e-Riyasat for the head of state. The NC plans to begin the new Assembly, if it has the numbers, with a resolution against the Centre’s decisions of August 5, 2019.
Mehbooba Mufti’s PDP has sought a final resolution on the Kashmir problem, resumption of dialogue between India and Pakistan, and more economic linkages in the region, while referring to the undivided erstwhile State of J&K as it existed prior to 1947.
Both the NC and the PDP have pledged to reverse the laws introduced to J&K in the past five years on land, jobs, mining rights, and natural resources. They have also promised to roll back laws such as the Public Safety Act (PSA), 1978; the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967; and the Enemy Agents Ordinance, 2005, which have been widely used by the Centre in the past five years to curb separatism in J&K. The PSA, which deals with preventive detention, is one of the few laws retained from the separate Constitution of the erstwhile State of J&K. In fact, Omar Abdullah from the NC and Ms. Mufti from the PDP, both former Chief Ministers, were detained by the Lieutenant Governor’s administration under the PSA in 2019 for several months.
Through their hardened positions, the two parties pose a new challenge to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Central government in navigating the volatile situation in J&K. The Centre had aimed to dislodge and discredit mainstream regional parties in J&K after 2019. It propped up new regional parties that treat Article 370 as part of the past and not as an issue of the future. However, in the District Development Council polls in 2020, the regional alliance, the People’s Alliance for Gupkar Declaration, won 110 out of 180 segments, showing how the regional parties still hold sway. During the Lok Sabha elections this year, the NC and Congress won two out of five seats in J&K. The Awami Ittehad Party, whose chief Sheikh Rashid, widely known as Engineer Rashid, has been calling for a referendum against “oppression” and involvement of the United Jehad Council in the talks, managed to win the Baramulla seat.
The new electoral calculus has the Centre rethinking its policy of political engineering. Its iron-hand approach towards separatists may have brought peace, which no thinking policymaker in New Delhi considers permanent. While restoring electoral politics will lessen the sense of alienation in J&K, New Delhi will have to engage with these political demands sooner rather than later. The BJP is a significant player in J&K, with a dedicated vote bank in the Hindu belt of the Jammu region. It has to reinvent itself like the NC and the PDP in J&K.
