Jammu and Kashmir is going through a political tailspin and the chances are that the state will have to go for fresh elections to break the logjam.
The state is under Governor’s rule since Jan. 9, two days after Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed died after protracted illness. His daughter Mehbooba Mufti, now the supreme leader of the Mufti’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP), could have been sworn in as the chief minister the very next say if she wanted.
But Mehbooba Mufti has played hardball with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with which her father ran a coalition government for ten months till his death. It’s nearly a month since the state was put under central rule and indications are that the two erstwhile allies are heading for a bitter showdown.
Mufti has been pushing the envelope and insisting that the BJP leadership gives a firm commitment for meeting the alliance agenda and a specific timeline for doing the needful. But this is easier said than done for the BJP. It will be BJP’s funeral if it were to do so. For example, the BJP, which is ruling the Centre, can never agree to PDP’s demands that Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) be removed from the state or disturbed areas of the state be de-notified.
First of all, BJP’s well-known navigator the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), which exercises the sort of veto power over the BJP government, which Sonia Gandhi used to do over the Manmohan Singh government from 2004 to 2014, will never allow the BJP’s leadership to do this. Even if Prime Minister Narendra Modi were to pick up the gauntlet and play a high stakes gamble — an unlikely scenario — all stakeholders in the Jammu and Kashmir political drama know for sure that Mufti won’t be stopping at demand number four or demand number forty. She will keep shifting the goalposts.
That’s why she is demanding that the Centre should pay about $6.5 billion for flood relief victims. This is 23 times than what the PDP claims the Centre actually paid or almost seven times than what the Modi government claims to have paid. The PDP has dismissed the Modi government’s tall claims as jugglery of statistics.
But a much bigger political power play is on in Jammu and Kashmir, which held assembly elections less than one year ago. Incidentally, Jammu and Kashmir is the only state in the country to have six-year tenure as against five-year tenure for all other states in India.
Mufti is acutely aware that she will be committing political hara-kiri by running government in alliance with the BJP foe next five years. The PDP’s popularity graph has gone down drastically over the past 10 months of her father’s rule.
The strategy of Mufti seems to be this. Get rid of all political baggage of the past. Let the past political equations thrashed out by her father be done away with. She has to reinvigorate and rejuvenate her political party the PDP at whatever cost and she can't perhaps do so with the BJP as a coalition partner.
Therefore, from Mufti’s viewpoint, it is absolutely necessary that she works on her steam and think long term rather than being shortsighted. The current political arithmetic of J&K is such that it allows only one two-party combination to rule the state and that is the PDP, which has 27 seats and the BJP 25 in the 87-member assembly. Any other combination would involve at least three parties with the National Conference and the Congress having 15 and 12 seats in the state assembly respectively.
The BJP is being viewed as a threat by the PDP, a national party versus a regional party kind of picture where the former is out to gobble up the latter by making forays into the Kashmir valley, the core constituency of the PDP.
This is the biggest concern of the PDP today. By kicking the chief minister’s chair, which she could have sat on weeks ago, Mufti is sending a powerful signal to all the political stakeholders, including her cadre and leaders that she is not hankering after power.
This would inevitably send a positive message to the electorate from Mufti’s viewpoint and may bolster her party’s political fortunes should fresh elections be held in the state. In the entire conundrum, it is the BJP, which stands to lose the most. That’s why the state unit of the BJP is not interested in fresh elections. The writing on the wall is clear. Jammu and Kashmir presents a big political challenge for Modi and his BJP. Seen whichever way, it is a lose-lose situation for the BJP.
