The Bharatiya Janata Party’s prospects in the ongoing assembly election in Jammu and Kashmir—the first to be held in the region since the Narendra Modi government abrogated the state’s special status, under Article 370 of the Constitution, and turned it into a union territory—depend on its performance in the Jammu division. In the last election, held in 2014, the BJP won 25 out of its 37 seats, enabling the party to form a coalition government for the first time in what was India’s only Muslim-majority state. The 2022 delimitation exercise allocated six additional seats to the division, where two-thirds of the population is Hindu, according to the 2011 census. This year, the BJP nominated only 15 candidates in the Kashmir division’s 47 constituencies, seemingly preferring to operate through proxies in the valley. However, if the BJP were to retain its dominance in the Jammu division, a fractured mandate in Kashmir, where the various parties opposed to the abrogation of Article 370 did not put up a united front, could leave it holding the balance of power.
During the election campaign, I travelled extensively through the Jammu, Poonch and Rajouri districts. I found that, while the government’s decision to accord Scheduled Tribe status to Pahari-speaking people of all castes had turned public sentiment in the BJP’s favour in the two hill districts, there was widespread dissatisfaction with the party in its traditional stronghold of Jammu. Much of it was tied to the withdrawal of protections under Articles 370 and 35A for permanent residents of the erstwhile state, which, several Jammu residents told me, had resulted in outside interests taking over lucrative sectors of the regional economy. The end of the annual winter migration of the government machinery from Srinagar to Jammu, a tradition dating back to 1872, had also curtailed economic activity. The recent escalation of militancy in Jammu after nearly two decades of relative calm had fostered a sense of insecurity among the population.
“Article 370 was introduced, during the times of Maharaja Hari Singh, with a vision and it proved to be of immense use while dealing with Pakistan and preserving the culture and heritage of this state,” Gulchain Singh Charak, the president of the Dogra Sadar Sabha—a Rajput organisation—and a former minister of higher education from the Congress, told me. Charak had briefly been placed under house arrest for protesting the abrogation, which, he argued, had compromised the safety and rights of the people of Jammu. “Lands were cheap and have been bought by outsiders,” he said. “Migration has taken place not to Kashmir but to Jammu, and jobs have been snatched from Jammuites.”
Avinash Mohananey, who served on the Intelligence Bureau’s Kashmir desk during the 2000s, told me that although the abrogation of Article 370 was not an emotive issue in Jammu, its residents had faced the resulting loss of businesses, jobs and land rights, and come to realise that the BJP’s narrative was only meant for electoral gains in the rest of India. He speculated that the government had allowed Abdul Rashid Sheikh—popularly known as Engineer Rashid—who won the Baramulla Lok Sabha seat while incarcerated in Delhi’s Tihar jail under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, to secure interim bail and campaign for his Awami Ittehad Party in the assembly election partly because of his rhetoric against the mainstream Kashmiri leaders Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti. “At the same time,” he added, “the BJP leadership may be feeling that Rashid’s narrative against it would inevitably polarise the voting pattern in the union territory, with consolidation of votes in Jammu in its favour.” The people I spoke to in Jammu, however, seemed far more concerned about their livelihoods than about anything Rashid had to say.