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

Among the many challenges the National Conference-Congress alliance, which won the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly polls on Tuesday (October 8), has on its hands now is how to engage with the Jammu region and reassure the Hindu-majority population there.

The alliance may have swept the elections across the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, but Tuesday’s results also showed a BJP wave across the Hindu-dominated Jammu region, particularly the areas under the Jammu plains.

This curious divide would further buttress the long-felt perception of Jammu’s Hindus lacking confidence in the “Muslim-led Valley parties”, the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) or, as the results now amply demonstrate, even the Congress, to effectively address their concerns of identity and participation in governance.

Congress wipe-out in Jammu

Of the 42 seats the NC had won or was leading in at 5.30 pm, only two (Ramban in Chenab Valley and Nowshera in Rajouri district) were set to have Hindu MLAs. The Congress contested 37 seats, including some in the Valley and those where it had a “friendly contest” with the NC. A majority of these constituencies were in the 43-seat Jammu region. However, of the six party candidates who won on Tuesday, none is a Hindu, or from Jammu.

It was a wipe-out for the Congress in the Hindu-dominated Jammu plains where it was pitted in a direct contest with the BJP and expected to deliver “Hindu representation” to the coalition. Prominent Hindu faces of the party, such as Raman Bhalla and the controversial Chaudhary Lal Singh, bit the dust in the RS Pura and Basohli seats, respectively.

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Tara Chand, former deputy chief minister and the Congress’s most prominent Dalit face in Jammu, finished a distant third in his traditional Chhamb constituency, while the party’s other upcoming Dalit leader and former NSUI national president, Neeraj Kundan, lost from the Bishnah constituency despite Priyanka Gandhi and a host of other senior Congress leaders, including Himachal Pradesh deputy CM Mukesh Agnihotri and former Punjab CM Charanjit Singh Channi, campaigning for him.

Heavily skewed legislative bloc

As such, the NC-Congress coalition, which is now set to form the new Jammu and Kashmir government following six years of central rule, is bound to be a legislative bloc heavily skewed – 49:2 (including CPM MLA from Kulgam, Mohammed Yousuf Tarigami) – in favour of Muslims, with no representation of Hindus from the Jammu plains.

The NC could induct both its Hindu MLAs — Arjun Singh Raju from Ramban and Surinder Chaudhary, who defeated J&K BJP chief Ravinder Raina in Nowshera — into Omar Abdullah’s council of ministers, but these two, though technically from the Jammu division, do not represent the Hindu-dominated Jammu plains.

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For the NC and the Congress, this presents a clear challenge. The Hindus of Jammu have long believed that the hegemony of Kashmir’s Muslim leadership has trampled upon their aspirations for a share in power while also paying little heed to their concerns of livelihood, identity assertion, economic well-being, and so on.

Sentiment of frustration and “othering”

The BJP’s growth in Jammu has largely been due to its success in exploiting this sentiment of frustration and “othering”. That Jammu and Kashmir has never had a Hindu chief minister from Jammu has also been highlighted by the BJP time and again to give the community that comprises 37 per cent of the population a sense of being cheated by Kashmir’s power elite, the NC’s Abdullahs and the PDP’s Muftis in particular.

The saffron party has, in the past and in the just-concluded poll campaign, repeatedly asserted issues that tap into this resentment, be it among Jammu’s Hindus as a whole or the more specific communities of Kashmiri Pandits, Dogras, Dalits, and even the Sikhs. And with the BJP sweeping the Jammu plains and making some gains in the Hindu pockets of Poonch-Rajouri and Chenab Valley, it can be relied upon to fish deeper into these troubled waters.

It is now for the NC and the Congress to strategize and implement an outreach programme that endears them to the Hindus of Jammu if they hope to stall the BJP’s Hindutva push in the region, and they will have to do so while simultaneously dealing with a predictably meddlesome Lieutenant Governor and the Centre who may not make administration of the Union Territory easy for CM-frontrunner Omar Abdullah.