It is of vital importance for the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi that the just-concluded assembly polls in Jammu and Kashmir have a finale in the national interest as the results have thrown up a fractured mandate where none of the four major parties has been able to secure a clear majority to form the government on its own steam. The state thus is in a political logjam and the government formation is still elusive even a week after the results came in.
The results have put the BJP in a situation where it is a given that the rightist Hindu nationalist party would be a king-maker and the chances are that it end up as being even the king. After winning 25 seats in the 87-member assembly, the BJP can well foist its own chief minister in the state. But the problem is that it will be a Hindu chief minister in India’s only Muslim-dominated state, something that has never happened before.
The BJP may gain Jammu and Kashmir as a trophy but India as a nation may be looking at a political specter wherein it alienates a politically sensitive and turbulent state. Instead, the BJP should stoop to conquer and facilitate a situation where the state has a Muslim chief minister from the Kashmir valley even though it has numbers to ensure that it installs a BJP leader (inevitably a Hindu) as the chief minister.
The Modi government needs to tread very cautiously as these were no ordinary elections. In many ways, the electoral exercise in the restive Indian state represented a transition, a transformation having a bearing on the entire nation’s destiny.
But the results have thrown up a hung house in the 87-member assembly with 28 seats for the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), 25 seats for the BJP, followed by 15 and 12 seats respectively for the National Conference (NC) and the Congress which together ruled the state for the last years.
Jammu and Kashmir comprises three regions: Kashmir valley, the biggest of them all with 46 seats in the assembly all of which are Muslim dominated, Jammu region with 37 seats and Ladakh with four seats, two each from the all-Muslim Kargil and all-Buddhist Leh. Sixteen of Jammu seats also are Muslim dominated. This means that 64 of the 87 constituencies in the state assembly are Muslim dominated.
The state has traditionally had a Muslim chief minister from the Kashmir valley. The just-concluded elections have thrown up a scenario where the BJP has had a virtual clean sweep in the Hindu-dominated region of Jammu while the Muslim seats have been shared by the other three parties — PDP, NC and Congress.
The BJP has emerged as the biggest political party in the state in terms of vote share (23 percent) as the single biggest political party, the PDP, which has won 28 seats has vote share of just about 22 per cent. Significantly, the BJP has won all its seats only from the Jammu region.
The ideal government in the state should be the one, which gives adequate representation to all regions of the state. Thus the ideal political combination should be PDP and BJP. The two parties together will have 53 seats and thus a comfortable majority in the state, guaranteeing a stable government.
But this is easier said than done. The two parties have conflicting political ideologies. While the BJP is committed to abrogation of Article 370, a Constitutional provision, which accords a special status to J&K, the PDP, like all other parties in the state, is vociferously for protecting the state’s special status. Moreover, PDP is virtually as rabid as the separatist Kashmiri outfits, though the only difference is that unlike the Hurriyat Conference, the main separatist grouping, the PDP has been part of the state’s political process and contesting elections.
The present political logjam in installation of a new government has to be ended by Jan. 19 when the current term of the state assembly expires. Failure to do so would inevitably mean Central rule in the state.
There is not much time left and all the stakeholders need to cooperate. The biggest responsibility falls on the shoulders of the BJP, which happens to be the ruling party at the Centre.
India has pulled off a remarkable achievement by holding free, fair and transparent elections in Jammu and Kashmir. The state has had a checkered history of poll boycotts. But the massive voters’ turnout this time is a 30-year record. This gives huge legitimacy to the elections.
It should go a long way in the making of India. PM Modi has been talking about “Make in India.” But “Making of India” precedes everything else. The current elections in Jammu and Kashmir underwrite this crucial theme: Making of India.
