SRINAGAR, 13 October — The main opposition Congress party and a regional ally haggled yesterday over the makeup of a coalition government in Kashmir, with the choice of who will lead the government bedeviling negotiations.

Congress leaders went into a huddle at party headquarters in New Delhi, while their counterparts from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) met at their headquarters in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital. Congress and the three-year-old PDP swept out the long-ruling National Conference (NC) in just-concluded four-phase polls in the disputed Himalayan state.

The NC emerged as the single largest party, grabbing 28 legislative seats — short of the 44 needed to form a government and less than half the 57 it held in the outgoing assembly.

The Congress and PDP together notched up 36 seats in the 87-member assembly and have agreed to form a coalition, while trying to woo enough independents to give them a majority. Following his party’s drubbing, chief minister Farooq Abdullah resigned Friday and committed the NC to working as a “healthy opposition”.

Most of the more than a dozen independent candidates have shown their willingness to support the Congress-PDP coalition, but the two main parties have yet to reach consensus over who will replace Farooq as chief minister.

The Congress, which has 20 legislators, says it should have the top post because it has the most seats in the coalition.

“Being bigger in numbers, I think Congress should be given a chance to form the government and others should support it,” said Saifudin Soz, a former Union minister and a Congress leader.

He called for Ghulam Nabi Azad to become chief minister, saying he could pull Kashmir out of its “present mess.”

But the PDP is yet to concede to the demand, arguing that for a sensitive state such as Kashmir a regional party rule would be more productive in governing than the Congress. PDP President Mufti Muhammad Sayeed yesterday held talks with Congress chief Sonia Gandhi in New Delhi.

“We exchanged ideas on the formation of a government. We held detailed discussions,” Sayeed told reporters afterward, but did not comment on who would be the new chief minister. He said the immediate task before Congress and PDP was how to bring other smaller parties in to form a state government.

Azad, a Muslim from the Hindu-majority southern Jammu region, has said he believes the chief minister should be from Jammu and his deputy from Muslim-majority Kashmir, or vice versa.

Kashmir has not been ruled by anyone from Jammu since 1953, when a Hindu king reigned. The state has been divided for a half-century between India and Pakistan, which both claim it in full.

The PDP, which did not win any seats in Jammu, insists the chief minister should be from the Kashmir Valley, the heart of the state’s 13-year insurgency.

Appointing a chief minister from Jammu “will send the wrong signals,” said PDP legislator Ghulam Hassan Mir.

“When we are trying to resolve the issue of Kashmir and the militancy, electing a chief minister who is not from the Kashmir Valley will complicate the situation further,” he said. “We have to understand that trouble lies here and we should be sensitive enough not to do anything that neutralizes whatever we have achieved in these elections,” Mir said.

Meanwhile, six independent legislators and two from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) said they had reached a “broad understanding” on whom to support, but did not elaborate.

One of the independents, former separatist Ghulam Mohiudin Sofi, said: “Whatever we decide we will decide together.”