Bad decisions, dull campaign: How Congress ‘gifted’ Jammu to BJP

With everyone still busy autopsying the BJP’s dizzying Assembly poll victory in Haryana, the Congress’s complete decimation in Jammu and Kashmir, particularly across Jammu division, has been reduced to a footnote.

Emboldened by the fact that despite its worst ever poll performance in J&K, it will still be a partner in power due to the massive win of its ally, the National Conference, the Congress has glossed over its own rout by emphasising the INDIA bloc’s win in the Union Territory. Yet, in more ways than one, its disastrous performance in Jammu should, arguably, worry the Congress more than the surprise defeat the party suffered in Haryana.

For, not only are the Jammu results symptomatic of a deep morass within the Congress but, more importantly, they portend ominous tidings for peace and stability in the already restive Union Territory and the new government that CM-elect Omar Abdullah will lead. Both these aspects of the J&K results need a deeper analysis.

Congress’s dismal figures

The Congress won just six of the 38 seats it contested in J&K as part of an alliance with the NC, the CPM and the Panther’s Party. Of these 38 seats, as many as 30 are in the Hindu-dominated Jammu division — the region accounts for 43 seats in the 90 member J&K Assembly — where the Congress was expected to deliver good results given the palpable resentment on the ground against the BJP in the run-up to the poll.

However, the Congress ended up winning just one of these 30 seats — that of Muslim-majority Rajouri. Its other winners, Tariq Hameed Karra, Ghulam Ahmed Mir, Peerzada Mohammad Syed, Irfan Lone, and Nizamuddin Bhat, won from the Kashmir division’s Central Shalteng, Dooru, Anantnag, Wagoora-Kreeri, and Bandipora seats, respectively.

Not even first runner-up

The scale of the party’s decimation in the Jammu division was such that not only did it lose 29 of the 30 seats it contested but in half these constituencies, the Congress’s candidate didn’t even finish first runner-up. Furthermore, across a majority of the 15 Jammu constituencies where the party finished second, a bulk of its candidates lost by huge margins, unlike in Haryana, where, despite a larger electorate, the party finished a close second in many constituencies (in Haryana’s nine seats, the Congress’s margin of defeat was less than 5,000 votes).

In the five Jammu division constituencies — Inderwal and Nagrota (where the NC was also in the fray), Vaishno Devi, Ramnagar, and Chhamb — the Congress candidate finished third. In Billavar, Samba, Bani, and Jasrota segments, Congress nominees ended up in the fourth position, even forfeiting their deposits in the latter two. In the Thannamandi constituency, the party candidate finished a very distant sixth.

Also read: J&K polls: NC, Abdullahs can bask in win, but must keep some lessons in mind

Congress “gifted” Jammu to BJP

In contrast, the Congress’s senior ally, the NC, contested across 57 Assembly segments, a bulk of them in the Muslim-majority Kashmir region — and won 42. Only two of the NC’s newly elected MLAs, Arjun Singh Raju from Ramban and Surinder Choudhary from Nowshera, are from the Jammu division.

Jammu-based political commentator Tarun Upadhyay believes the Congress “practically gifted the Jammu region to the BJP”. Till a month before the polls, Upadhyay says, the public sentiment across Jammu was against the BJP.

“There was no dearth of issues over which the public was riled up... restoration of statehood for J&K, high unemployment, inflated power bills, widespread drug addiction among Jammu youth, discontent in the Dogra community, militancy in Jammu, and the economic cost Jammu was forced to pay for the J&K Lieutenant Governor’s decision of halting the ‘durbar move’ were all issues that had made Jammu’s political ground fertile for a Congress wave. But as the poll campaign took off, it became clear that the Congress was throwing away the election,” said Upadhyay.

Lacklustre campaign

A senior Congress leader from Jammu told The Federal, “A handful of J&K Congress leaders, Bharatsinh Solanki (Congress’s J&K in-charge) and KC Venugopal (AICC’s general secretary in charge of organisation) misled the high command in candidate selection, as well as in the seats we agreed to give the NC as part of the seat-sharing deal; people who couldn’t win a panchayat election were picked at the cost of winning candidates; the screening committee even got the caste mix wrong.”

Multiple Congress leaders from Jammu, including several candidates The Federal spoke to also claimed that the “party high command led a very lacklustre campaign in Jammu” with Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, Lok Sabha’s Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi, and party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi “simply campaigning as a formality”.

“Two of Rahul’s rallies had to be cancelled because of bad weather but no one bothered to even get him to record a video message for the people or even to express regret on his Twitter account for not being able to come... in Chhamb, where he was supposed to address a rally, people waited for hours before being told by Ghulam Ahmed Mir that Rahul was not coming,” one Congress leader said.

Remark against Modi backfired

Another leader claimed that senior Congress leaders such as Mir, Raman Bhalla, Tara Chand, Tariq Hameed Karra and Vikar Rasool Wani “hijacked the high command by getting the party’s campaign managers to schedule a bulk of Kharge and Rahul’s rallies and interactions in their own constituencies instead of in the seats where our candidates really needed help”.

Yet another party candidate said “Kharge and Rahul’s attempts to mock Modi in Jammu backfired... we lost all Jammu seats where Rahul, Kharge, and Priyanka campaigned; in Jasrota, where Kharge made that speech about not dying until he removes Modi from office, our candidate came fourth and lost his deposit. We lost every SC-reserved seat we contested despite having a Dalit national president and promising social justice.”

BJP’s aggressive campaign

The BJP, on the other hand, unleashed an aggressive campaign, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh collectively leading the charge, Congress leaders said. Ahead of the third phase of polling, even Omar Abdullah was constrained to point at the high-octane campaign by Modi, Shah and Singh while lamenting that Rahul needed to focus on the Congress campaign in Jammu.

Upadhyay said the Congress’s pre-poll alliance with the NC also damaged its prospects in the Jammu division, particularly across the Dogra Hindu-dominated Jammu, Samba, Kathua, and Udhampur districts, as it allowed the BJP to encash on the mistrust that Jammu Hindus have of the Kashmir-oriented NC (and also PDP).

“The BJP played on the fear of Jammu Hindus by constantly reminding them that they will have to go ‘with a begging bowl’ to Kashmir if the Congress-NC alliance wins; they exploited the deep resentment that many Jammu Hindus have against the Abdullahs and the fact that J&K has never had a Hindu CM. An impression was created across Jammu that the verdict in Kashmir will be hugely fractured and the BJP will eventually form the government if it sweeps Jammu and give J&K a Hindu CM. Some BJP candidates openly campaigned for a Dogra CM... the Congress simply had no counter-campaign,” Upadhyay explained.

Also read: Hindu engagement: With low representation from Jammu, NC-Congress face big hurdle

NC “backstabbed” Congress?

A former Congress MLA from the Jammu region said the NC also “backstabbed the Congress in several seats”, alleging that NC chief Farooq Abdullah “gave his blessings” to several “rebel” candidates who entered the poll fray against Congress candidates and that “in Muslim-dominated pockets of the Jammu division where NC has a cadre, its people did not vote” for Congress nominees.

Congress leaders said it was no surprise that after the results, the “NC rebels” who won as independents from seats in the Jammu region readily extended support to CM-elect Omar Abdullah. These “rebels” include Pyarelal Sharma, Chaudhary Akram, Rameshwar Singh, and Muzaffar Iqbal Khan, who won from Jammu division’s Inderwal, Surankote, Bani, and Thannamandi, respectively.

The Chhamb case

What is also interesting is the decision of Satish Sharma, the newly elected Independent MLA from Chhamb, to support the NC instead of aligning with the six-member Congress legislative bloc. Sharma is the son of veteran Congress leader and former Jammu MP the late Madan Lal. Sources said Sharma was keen on contesting from Chhamb as a Congress candidate but was “forced to fight as an Independent” after the party picked former deputy CM and Dalit leader Tara Chand as its nominee from the seat.

“Tara was Madan Lal’s protégé. Madan Lal had vacated the Chhamb seat for Tara when the constituency became reserved for Dalits. After the recent delimitation exercise, Chhamb was made a general seat while the adjoining Akhnoor seat was reserved for SCs. The ideal solution for the party would have been to field Satish from Chhamb and move Tara to Akhnoor. That way, we may have won both seats but Tara refused to vacate Chhamb and Satish decided to contest as an Independent. Tara ended up in the third position while Satish won but our blunders didn’t end here. After the result, no Congress leader reached out to Satish for support while Farooq called him up directly and gave him some assurances, which sealed Satish’s support for the NC,” a close aide of the new Chhamb MLA told The Federal.

Religious, regional polarisation

The net result of the Congress’s blunders in Jammu was a BJP sweep across 29 of the division’s 43 Assembly segments. The religious and regional polarisation that this result has created can be understood from the fact that within the Jammu region, the only seats that the NC and the Congress could win were those in the Chenab Valley or the mountainous Poonch-Rajouri region that have a sizeable Muslim vote while the BJP swept the Hindu-dominated Jammu plains.

This anomaly, largely the outcome of Congress’s poll drubbing, has now created a precarious and ironic situation within the power dynamics of J&K. “The Hindu-dominated Jammu voted decisively for the BJP in the false hope that a CM from their region is possible and so is a larger share of power for Jammu’s Hindus. Now, neither will happen because the Kashmir-centric NC will hold the levers of power while Jammu will be an Opposition block whose well-being will be entirely dependent on whatever largesse Omar Abdullah deems enough to grant Jammu,” claims political analyst and columnist Anil Anand.

Independents may reduce Omar’s headache

With the Hindu Independents from Jammu extending support to the NC-led ruling coalition, Omar’s complication of how to address the representation of the Hindu-majority Jammu plains in his government may be resolved. However, Anand points out that representation alone “will not assuage the aspirations and sentiments of the Jammu electorate, which may continue to nurse the grouse of being dependent on the generosity of Kashmir’s Muslim power elite”.

This frustration, says Anand, will allow the BJP to “continue exploiting to its advantage the trust deficit between Jammu and Kashmir, which may ultimately deepen both religious and regional polarisation and trigger social unrest.” A senior Kashmir-based political analyst who did not wish to be named agreed with Anand’s assessment.

“The sort of election result we have now is a perfect excuse for reviving a troubling idea that the RSS and the (long defunct) Praja Parishad silently worked towards in the early decades of J&K’s merger with India, which was that Hindu-majority Jammu should be bifurcated from Muslim-majority Kashmir... several right-wing Twitter handles began stoking this fire as soon as the results were out and it is not hard to imagine how thrilled the BJP would be if these murmurs gain momentum on the ground,” the Kashmiri analyst said, adding, “if things come to such a pass, the country should know it all began with the Congress messing up its election in Jammu.”