Kashmir’s high-stakes polls for low-power assembly

By Sumantra Bose, London School of Economics in Kolkata

In one sense, not very much is at stake in the ongoing election to the legislative assembly of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir. 

Union Territory assemblies and governments have severely limited powers. The assembly and government in Kashmir will be even more toothless than the norm because of the heavily securitised environment where the real clout rests with the bureaucracy, the army and the intelligence apparatus.

Jammu and Kashmir’s assembly of 90 members will not have much to legislate on and its government will have powers similar to a municipal authority. 

Yet, the stakes are high, especially for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. 

This election — which Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah tried to put off for as long as possible — is a referendum on the Hindu nationalist solution to the Kashmir question which has been under implementation since August 2019. 

That solution not only liquidated and dismembered the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir. It eliminated the vestigial remnants of the state’s autonomy (Article 370 of the Indian constitution) and its residents’ protected rights to government jobs and ownership of land and property (Article 35A).

Article 1 (1) of India’s constitution says, “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States”. The union territories (UT) are a residual feature of the country’s constitutional architecture, almost an afterthought. 

Until 2019, there were seven union territories, mostly tiny islands and coastal enclaves. Of these, only two — Delhi, the national capital, and Puducherry in the south, which consists of four coastal enclaves — had directly elected legislative assemblies and governments.

They are essentially ruled by the Centre (the Union government in New Delhi) and are subject to its authority through a Lieutenant-Governor, a vice-regal official deputed by the Centre. 

Yet, the election in Jammu and Kashmir — held five years after Modi’s government promised to do so, and only after a directive of India’s Supreme Court in December 2023 – has seen quite a scramble among the erstwhile state’s spectrum of political parties. That is because it signals the return of something resembling normal politics.

Return of competitive politics

In August 2019, Modi’s government railroaded a law called the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act through India’s parliament. This law revoked the status of Jammu & Kashmir as a constituent state of the Indian Union and dismembered it into two UTs: Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Jammu and Kashmir has 98 percent of the state’s population.   

The institutional framework of competitive politics was liquidated overnight, and grassroots political activity was throttled by fear and persecution. A draconian policy of iron-fisted repression effectively criminalised all shades of political opinion — including pro-Indian variants — barring one: the Hindu nationalist view. 

The strategy overseen by Modi’s home minister Amit Shah aimed to erase competitive politics in Jammu and Kashmir. As a backup, Modi’s government sponsored a gerrymandering exercise that increased the representation of Hindu-majority parts of the Jammu region in any future assembly.

Jammu and Kashmir’s electorate is considerable. The population is about 13.5 million — around 7.5 million people live in the Kashmir Valley and six million in the Jammu region to the south. The territory sprawls across 42,241 square kilometres: the Valley’s area is 15,948 square kilometres and Jammu has 26,293 square kilometres. The assembly will consist of 47 members elected from the Valley and 43 from Jammu.

The prime minister appeared in person to campaign in mid-September, when he addressed a rally in Doda, a town with a two-thirds Muslim majority nestled in a valley surrounded by mountains in the deep interior of the Jammu region. He followed it up with a rally in Srinagar, the Kashmir Valley’s major city, and a rally and roadshow in the Jammu region’s Reasi district, whose population is evenly split between Hindus and Muslims.

In India’s 2024 parliamentary election, the BJP did not put up its own candidates in any of the Kashmir Valley’s three constituencies. The party has put up candidates in 19 of the Valley’s 47 constituencies in the Union Territories election but is unlikely to win any. 

Its hopes rest on the Jammu region, which has an overall Hindu majority. Its prospects are uncertain here too. The BJP retained both of Jammu’s parliamentary constituencies in 2024 but its victory margins declined drastically from 2019, signalling falling support among the Jammu region’s Hindus.

The stakes are also significant for the Congress party, which managed a limited revival in India’s 2024 election. The Congress too is mainly banking on the Jammu region, whose Hindus mostly voted for the party for decades before shifting to the BJP in and after 2014. 

Many of these voters returned to the Congress in the 2024 parliamentary election. In addition, the Congress has had traditional bases of support among Muslim communities in the Jammu region, as well as in pockets in the southern part of the Kashmir Valley.

Tough times for ruling families

Apart from the BJP, the stakes are highest for the two large parties of the erstwhile state: the J&K National Conference (NC) and the J&K People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Both are predominantly Valley-based but have had limited support in the Jammu region.

Since 1996, the two parties alternated in running state governments — the NC from 1996 to 2002 and 2008 to 2014 (in the latter period with Congress support), and the PDP from 2002 to 2008 (with Congress support) and 2015 to 2018 (with BJP support).

Both parties have a dynastic character. The NC is the fief of the Abdullah family and the PDP of the Mufti family. The two families, traditionally bitter rivals, performed a vital middleman role for decades by helping the Centre to control the Valley’s restive population. 

The new, ultra-centralist Kashmir policy unveiled in August 2019 cut the ground from under their feet by brutally dispensing with their services. Left orphaned and redundant, their patrimony lost, the dispossessed Kashmiri dynasts are desperately seeking to re-assert themselves in this election. The NC, which has made a seat-sharing pact with the Congress, has relatively better prospects of doing so than the PDP.

But the prospects of both parties have been muddied by the entry of wild-card contestants into the fray in the Kashmir Valley. One is the Awami Ittehad Party (People’s Unity Party, AIP) led by Abdul Rashid Sheikh aka “Engineer Rashid”. 

Rashid, a two-time member of the state’s legislative assembly, sensationally won the Baramulla parliamentary constituency, which consists of the Valley’s northern districts, in India’s 2024 election, defeating former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah of the NC. 

He stood as an independent and ran in absentia from Delhi’s Tihar Jail, where he has been incarcerated since 2019. Paroled for two hours to take his oath as a parliamentarian, he has now been paroled again to campaign for his party’s candidates in the Valley.

An even more intriguing factor is the re-surfacing of the Jama’at-i-Islami (Islamic Rally, JI). A Sunni fundamentalist group of strongly pro-Pakistan orientation, the JI was banned by Modi’s government in March 2019 along with the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), a pro-independence group. The JI, which has a sizable base of loyal supporters in the Valley, is running at least ten candidates as independents in the Union Terrirory assembly election, in a tactical alliance with Rashid’s party.

The Union Territory election marks the return of political competition and contention in Jammu & Kashmir after five years of suffocating suppression. The composition of the assembly of 90 members may reflect the rainbow diversity of J&K’s society and politics, in another setback to the Hindu nationalist government’s policy of suppression and exclusion.

Sumantra Bose, a comparative political scientist, has researched and written on the Kashmir conflict for three decades. His book Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-Century Conflict (Yale University Press and Picador India, 2021), has been released in an updated Picador India paperback edition in August 2024.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

(Cover Photo: Voters line up at a polling booth in Kupwara in 2008. Hariom Mehra. Credits Photo Division, Ministry of I & B,Govt.of India)