The defeat of the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (NC) in last week’s bypolls in the Budgam Assembly constituency presages a big political change in Kashmir’s electoral politics.
Ever since the Assembly elections of October 2024 that gave NC’s Omar Abdullah a landslide mandate to lead the state as its first chief minister since Article 370’s abrogation, the political situation in the region has lurked from crisis to crisis, with the public largely disillusioned with his way of working, especially his lack of ability to push back against the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Centre.
Among the most thorny issues has been the new reservation program that has extended affirmative action benefits by more than 70 percent in a state where the majority of people are affiliated to the ‘general category’ and compete for jobs or for medical and engineering seats in government colleges on the basis of merit.
Although the new scheme was implemented by the Centre and came into effect well before Omar was elected as CM, his failure to address the issue has stood in sharp relief against his campaign promises that he would overturn the policy seen widely as being unfair.
Second is the factionalism within the party. Omar’s public gestures of being very appeasing towards the top figures in the Central government, hugging them, garlanding them, and felicitating them with Kashmiri shawls has also evoked sharp disappointment among the electorate. Among the first people to oppose him for such deferential posturing was his own Member of Parliament (MP) and junior colleague Aga Ruhullah Mehdi.
The Ruhullah Factor
Ruhullah has since become an icon in his own right, leveraging the widespread public angst over home demolitions of alleged militants, sackings of public employees on the pretext of being ‘anti-national’, widespread detentions and the skewed reservation policy. Although Omar doesn’t have any role in these decisions, it is the impression of his stoic acceptance of them that has stirred the local resentment.
Ruhullah, on the other hand, has come to acquire a respectable political stature. He railed against the Centre in his speeches in the Parliament, including when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MPs justified the home demolitions and arrests in Kashmir, asking, “Us mein galat kya hai? (What is wrong with that?)"
His statements, including those where he has been censorious of Omar, have been seen as a sign of his political integrity and uprightness.
Thus, Ruhullah became the foil against which Omar's perceived failures came to be judged acutely. His popularity is the reason why, despite his not seeing eye to eye with the Abdullahs, the NC has not had the gumption to dismiss Ruhullah from the party for insubordination.
NC’s Star MP Didn’t Campaign for the Party
This animosity reached a stage where Ruhullah simply refused to campaign for the party during the last week’s bypolls in Budgam, necessitated by the withdrawal of Omar from the Budgam Assembly constituency, which he had won along with the Ganderbal seat.
As per the rules, after being elected as a CM, Omar could have retained only one of the two Assembly constituencies he had won. He kept the Ganderbal, but let go of Budgam, a traditional NC bastion since 1977.
Budgam constituency is shaped by an interesting interplay of social and sectarian dynamics, chiefly on account of its large Shia Muslim population. It is this demographic segment whose imagination was fired with the NC’s decision to field Ruhullah, a venerated Shia leader, in the Parliamentary seat of Srinagar (of which Budgam is a part) in the May 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
The Shia voters repaid the gesture by voting for Abdullah in the Assembly polls held later in October.
In those polls, Abdullah had racked up 35,804 votes against 17,445 votes of Aga Syed Muntazir Mehdi, the 31-year-old candidate from the rival People's Democratic Party (PDP). Mehdi is also a Shia cleric from the same respectable family of Agas as Ruhullah. Yet the voters overlooked Mehdi, and polled heavily in favour of Abdullah.
However, with Ruhullah affirming his disgruntlement with his party to the extent of not campaign for them, it didn’t take long for NC’s fortunes to swing in reverse.
Fielded again by the PDP in the bypoll, Muntazir secured 21,534 votes this time against those of the NC candidate Aga Syed Mehmood, who bagged only 17,382, thus routing the NC from the seat it had held consistently for more than 40 years. It means that Muntazir, who had lost to NC by over 18,000 votes in October last year, has now defeated NC’s candidate by more than 4,000 votes.
An Unexpected Show of Support
The BJP has celebrated this win, for the saffron party only sees NC as a roadblock for its dream of appointing a Hindu chief minister in the Muslim-majority region. NC is a political behemoth in Kashmir and enjoys a traditional voter base whose loyalties go as far back as the year 1931.
Thus, in the event of any government formation in J&K, NC’s participation used to be an inevitability until 1999, when PDP came into existence. But the party’s political ship had capsized on the rocky shores of Kashmir’s fractious politics. Its alliance with the BJP in 2014 became a key reason for its unpopularity as the party was accused of having paved the way for Article 370’s dissolution. The 28 seats the party had won in the 2014 Assembly elections was reduced to just three in the 2024 polls.
There are now two aspects to NC’s defeat. One, that the BJP has discovered the chink in the armour of Kashmir’s grand old party. It will now know which cards to play and when, whom to support and whom to not. Some of the party leaders such as Ravinder Raina have gone as far as showing outrage over the perceived slights aimed at Ruhullah by the NC’s Hindu deputy chief minister Surinder Kumar Choudhary, which is strange.
The BJP will continue doing what it has been doing all along. With their own Lieutenant Governor at the helm, the saffron party will demonstrate that it has both the will and the wherewithal to prevail over the elected government, and there isn’t much that Omar will be able to do about it—except plead vainly for the statehood’s restoration, which the NC supremo Farooq Abdullah again did on 15 November, in wake of the deadly explosion of a weapon’s cache at a police station in Srinagar.
The senior Abdullah was meaning to hammer home the idea that, had the domains of police and law and order been with the elected government, these mishaps wouldn’t have happened. Hence, the demand for statehood.
Second, this crucial victory marks the spectacular return of the PDP on the political chessboard of the region. It also proves that whenever the political displeasure with the NC grows, the PDP is going to be its principal beneficiary.
NC Fumbling in the Dark
The defeat will now put pressure on Omar to up the ante with the BJP-led Centre or risk receding into political wilderness, dogged by the allegations of administrative inefficiency, lack of political will, and far too much deference for New Delhi and Prime Minister Modi than was needed.
As for the BJP, it has grown sharper. Last month, the party demonstrated a high degree of political acumen when it managed to win one of the four Rajya Sabha seats from J&K even though its share in the Legislative Assembly accounted for less than a third.
Even when the NC is contending with the loss of one MLA in the J&K Assembly, the BJP is proudly flaunting that it was able to retain its MLA in Nagrota in Jammu, the second vacant Assembly seat on which the bypolls were held last week, occasioned by the demise of its incumbent Devendra Singh Rana. His daughter has stepped into his shoes, emerging as a fresh political face from the union territory.
In this sense, NC’s defeat in Budgam has given the BJP more clarity on how it is to proceed further on its mission to capture electoral power in J&K, while leaving the NC to fumble in the dark with a bloody nose.
(Shakir Mir is an independent journalist reporting on news and politics form Srinagar, Kashmir. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)