The BJP lost, but it will be hard to ignore in Jammu and Kashmir

The Bharatiya Janata Party on Tuesday emerged as the second-largest party in the first Assembly elections held in Jammu and Kashmir in a decade.

With 29 seats, all from Jammu region, this is the party’s best performance since it fought its first poll in Jammu and Kashmir in 1987.

And yet, the results do not allow the Hindutva party a shot at power, given the decisive victory for the National Conference and the Congress alliance, which has won 49 of the 90 seats.

It was not for want of trying. Since August 2019, when the Narendra Modi government sprung the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution on the state of Jammu and Kashmir and broke it up into two union territories, the BJP-led Centre had set in motion a chain of exercises to change the electoral cartography of the region.

From delimitation to reserving seats for the Scheduled Caste communities to introducing a new quota for the Pahari tribe, the BJP put in place several measures to offset its most evident weakness – its unpopularity in the Kashmir Valley.

Not all of these steps were successful. “There’s no gain for the BJP after having done so much,” said Anuradha Bhasin, senior journalist and executive editor of Kashmir Times.

However, the election results do prove that the BJP will remain a party difficult to ignore in Jammu and Kashmir’s political landscape. More importantly, the sharply polarised verdict – with Jammu division and the Valley voting on contrasting lines – is likely to be a challenge for the next government, pointed out observers.

What worked – delimitation and SC reservation

In May 2022, the delimitation commission increased the total number of Assembly seats in Jammu and Kashmir to 90 seats from 83. Six of the seven new segments were in the Jammu division. By the end of the exercise, Kashmir Valley had 47 seats, while Jammu had 43.

Opposition parties in Kashmir had criticised the delimitation commission for adding more seats from the Hindu-majority Jammu belt, which was seen as a way to skew the contest in the BJP’s favour.

On Tuesday, the delimitation exercise appeared to have favoured BJP.

Of the six new seats added to Jammu region, the saffron party won five – Doda West, Padder-Nagsei, Ramgarh, Jasrota and Ramnagar.

The BJP’s performance also appears to have been boosted by the Centre’s decision to extend citizenship to various marginal communities living in Jammu.

Following the reading down of Article 370, around two lakh people from three communities – West Pakistan refugees, Valmikis and Gurkhas – who have been living in Jammu since many decades, got domicile status as well as voting rights. These groups are spread across Jammu, Kathua and Samba regions, where the BJP has won handsomely.

Finally, the Centre’s decision to provide for reservation of seven Assembly segments for the Scheduled Castes in Jammu and Kashmir, which was approved by Parliament in December, appears to have borne fruit.

The Muslim-majority Kashmir valley has no Scheduled Caste population, and so all the seats reserved in this category fall in Jammu region.

As the election results showed, BJP swept all seven SC reserved seats in Jammu.

What did not – reservation to Paharis

However, the Union government’s decision to grant Scheduled Tribe reservation to Paharis failed to cut ice with voters.

In March, the Centre granted the million-strong Pahari speaking community in Jammu and Kashmir the status of a tribe, inviting accusations from the Opposition parties that the Centre’s aims were to gain electorally in the Jammu’s Pir Panjal region.

In the 2014 Assembly elections, the party had made inroads in the region for the first time with two seats.

But in this election, the party has ended up squandering its advantage. Of the eight seats in Rajouri and Poonch districts in the Pir Panjal region, the BJP has managed to win only one. Strikingly, the party’s working president Ravinder Raina failed to retain his Nowshera seat.

“They have not been able to get any advantage from the Pahari factor,” said Chowdhary, the former professor of political science at University of Jammu.

A closer analysis shows that the party’s performance has remained somewhat closer to the results of 2014.

Bhasin, senior journalist and executive editor of Kashmir Times, pointed out: “In fact, in many segments of the Jammu heartland, the BJP’s margin of victory has come down.”

The data supports Bhasin’s assessment. In 2014, BJP had won 67.5 % of the total seats in Jammu. In the 2024 Assembly elections, the party won 67.44 % of the seats (29 of the 43).

Chowdhary, the former professor at Jammu University, concurred with that assessment. “In 2014, BJP registered its best performance. In terms of the proportion of seats in this election, the BJP has done equally well,” she argued.

Sound and fury: Independent candidates

While the Bharatiya Janata Party had not entered into any pre-poll alliance in Kashmir Valley, it had relied on a strategy of fracturing votes in Kashmir valley by backing 8-10 independent candidates.

But, of the 215 independent candidates in fray in the entire Kashmir Valley, only two won.

Even the release from Tihar Jail of the parliamentarian from Baramulla, Engineer Rashid, to campaign for the Assembly polls, had been viewed with suspicion by local regional parties.

While Rashid’s party fielded 36 candidates in Kashmir Valley, only his brother, Khursheed Ahmad Sheikh, managed to score a victory from the Langate seat.

The Jammu question

Even though the National Conference and Congress alliance is not short of numbers to form the government, it would be difficult to ignore the mandate from Jammu’s Hindu heartland, which has overwhelmingly voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party.

For decades, Jammu and Kashmir have been divided along regional lines. While Kashmir Valley has been at the heart of the erstwhile state’s politics, Jammu has always felt sidelined at the cost of Muslim-majority Kashmir. This polarisation is visible in the electoral results as well.

While the National Conference and Congress alliance scored most of its seats in Kashmir Valley, the BJP got all of its 29 seats from the Jammu region.

A similar situation had been in the backdrop of the Peoples Democratic Party’s decision to form a coalition government with the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014.

At that time, PDP had emerged as the single largest player with 28 seats while the BJP had scored 25 seats – all of them in Jammu. In this election, the PDP has been reduced to just three seats.

“This has basically been an election of the National Conference versus BJP,” explained Chowdhary, the former professor of political science at University of Jammu. “National Conference has done well in Jammu but the dominant Hindu belt vote has not gone either to the NC or Congress. This is going to be a problem for the NC because there is some sort of imbalance in the dispensation and there are sensitivities about that.”

According to Chowdhary, it remains to be seen how the new government led by the National Conference will try to accommodate Jammu’s interests. “They will certainly have to think of something and be more innovative.”

The BJP’s sweep of the Hindu vote in Jammu has to be looked at through the Congress’s failure to capitalise on anti-incumbency in Jammu, Chowdhary added. “Despite the fact that there had been a lot of talk about the resentment against the BJP in Jammu, the Congress could not take advantage of it,” she said. Of the total six seats won by Congress in the election, only one came from Jammu.