BJP’s last bid to retrieve lost ground in Jammu
JAMMU: Politics makes strange bedfellows, goes a saying, and so it did on March 1, 2015, when People’s Democratic Party (PDP) patron Mufti Mohammed Sayeed and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national general secretary Ram Madhav forged an alliance between the two parties that were ideologically poles apart.
Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, who founded the PDP in 1999, had then dubbed the alliance a meeting of “North Pole and South Pole.” He died in January 2016.
Three years, three months and 18 days later, what has been described as a “marriage of convenience” and “unholy alliance” ended with the BJP parting ways with the PDP on Tuesday and pulling out of the Jammu and Kashmir government headed by Sayeed’s daughter Mehbooba Mufti.
Many see it as a calculated political move by the BJP ahead of Lok Sabha elections next year, aimed at retrieving its core constituency of Jammu, from where the party had won an unprecedented 25 assembly seats in the 2014 elections.
A look back at the turbulent journey of the two partners shows that the BJP has been playing second fiddle to the PDP at the expense of the Jammu region.
Soon after taking the oath of office in 2015, then chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed had kicked up a controversy when he gave some credit for the smooth conduct of elections to the Hurriyat Conference, an umbrella group of separatist outfits, militant organisations and “people from across the border”, an oblique reference to Pakistan.
“While the two partners had many contradictions since day one and fissures kept threatening the alliance, in my opinion, the three factors that eventually toppled the government were Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s highly obnoxious statement of crediting Pakistan, Hurriyat and militants for smooth assembly elections in 2014, inept handling of infamous Kathua case and unilateral ceasefire announced during Ramzan,” says senior journalist and political analyst Sant Kumar Sharma.
The Kathua case refers to the rape and murder of an eight-yearold girl and the defence of suspects by some members of the BJP. A one-month halt on counter-insurgency operations for Ramzan was called off by the Centre on Monday. Sharma noted that Mufti had jumped the gun by proposing the halt on counter-insurgency operations after an allparty meeting on May 9 without taking the BJP on board.
The decision to axe two cabinet ministers, Choudhary Lal Singh and Chander Parkash Ganga of the BJP, for their presence in a Hindu Ekta Manch rally in March in defence of the Kathua accused was also resented in the Hindu-majority Jammu region.
After the BJP gave in to Mufti’s demand for a halt to operations against militant groups during Ramzan, the BJP came in for more flak from the Jammu region. The BJP, which only had the experience of “agitational politics” in Jammu and Kashmir, also was seen as largely lacking administrative expertise and intellect, unlike Mufti and her party.
A section of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological mentor of the BJP, felt that state BJP lacked a strong leader and always looked up to the central leadership to resolve even petty issues. “While BJP kept losing ground in Jammu, as it remained non-committal to its constituency, Mehbooba kept catering to her people in Kashmir,” a senior RSS leader said on condition of anonymity.