BJP may have won Jammu and Udhampur, but fissures run deep in fortresses

After a bitterly fought election, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) may have won the Jammu and Udhampur Lok Sabha constituencies – both Hindu-dominated seats of Jammu and Kashmir – but the fine print of these victories must give the saffron party reasons to worry.

On June 1, as counting trends solidified into results, the BJP’s Jugal Kishore Sharma and Union minister Jitendra Singh triumphed in the Jammu and Udhampur seats, respectively, for a third consecutive time. The two seats saw a direct contest between the BJP and the Congress, which had the backing of INDIA partner National Conference.

Modi’s narrative

While Sharma defeated Raman Bhalla – the two were also pitted against each other in 2019 – with a margin of over 1.35 lakh votes, Narendra Modi’s confidant Jitendra Singh secured 1.24 lakh votes more than Chaudhary Lal Singh, a feisty and popular Hindu-Dogra leader who had returned to the Congress just ahead of the Lok Sabha polls.

That the BJP retained both Jammu and Udhampur despite an anti-incumbency of 10 years against its MPs is, undoubtedly, no mean feat. Yet, its victories must also be analysed against the narrative that Modi and his party had tried to set in Jammu, particularly since the Centre’s move to abrogate Article 370 five years ago.

During the election campaign, Modi said at a rally in Udhampur: “Article 370 had created a wall and the people of J&K couldn’t look beyond it… I dismantled this wall and the people have benefited immensely by it.”

Through the past five years, every political and electoral move of the BJP concerning Jammu and Kashmir had revolved around this same pitch of Modi; that the abrogation had ushered in unprecedented development, peace and normalcy in the erstwhile state that was downsized to a Union Territory.

Feeling betrayed

An inescapable subtext of the BJP’s narrative had also been that the abrogation would bring unbridled prosperity to the Hindu-dominated Jammu region, which in the past had often complained of its aspirations being left unrealized due to the hegemony of Muslim-dominated Kashmir.

The saffron ecosystem invested substantial resources in telling the people of Jammu that with Article 370 gone, they could finally seek parity and even surpass Kashmir’s Muslims in every walk of life.

The abrogation would usher in major investment, create jobs, allow people of Jammu to amass property in Kashmir, give Jammu residents greater say and participation in the UT’s governance, et al, was all part of this dream that Modi and his party sold to the region’s Hindus ad nauseam.

Delimitation exercise

The delimitation of parliamentary and Assembly constituencies that was carried out by the Election Commission after the abrogation too tried to deepen this narrative by carving new seats in a manner that Muslim concentration in constituencies of the Jammu region is minimized.

The Muslim-dominated Poonch and Rajouri areas were virtually sliced out of Hindu Jammu and added to the erstwhile Anantnag Lok Sabha constituency; ensuring that Hindus enjoyed near complete dominance in the Jammu and Udhampur constituencies.

In short, the people of Jammu were told that after 75 years of playing second fiddle to the Kashmiris, their time had finally come and that Modi had made this happen.

Narrative fails

The verdict of 2024, however, suggests that the BJP’s projection of a sterling future for Jammu, perhaps, did not find the sort of resonance that the saffron party had hoped for.

It would be misleading to read the 1 lakh+ leads that the BJP candidates registered against their Congress rivals as thumping victories. In the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha polls, when Jammu witnessed a voter turnout of 67.83 per cent and 72.50 per cent, respectively, Sharma won the Jammu seat with margins of 2.57 lakh votes and 3.02 lakh votes, respectively.

This election, despite Muslim-dominated segments such as Rajouri, Darhal, Mendhar, Poonch and Nowshera being removed from Jammu and merged into the Rajouri-Anantnag constituency, Sharma’s lead plummeted to just over 1.35 lakh votes though over 13 lakh votes (72.22 percent) were cast.

In Udhampur, where the BJP was ambitiously targeting a lead of over 4 lakh votes for Jitendra Singh, the victory margin came down to just over 1.24 lakh votes. Though Singh had won the 2014 polls from Udhampur, defeating then Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad with a modest lead of about 61,000 votes, he had wrested the constituency with a mammoth margin of 3.57 votes in 2019, defeating Vikramaditya Singh, son of Congress veteran and Jammu and Kashmir’s titular Maharaja, Karan Singh.

Udhampur drama

It must be noted that Vikramaditya is now with the BJP and Azad, who quit the Congress to float his own outfit, the Democratic Progressive Azad Party (DPAP), is largely viewed in the UT now as a BJP proxy.

Many believed that Azad’s decision to field DPAP leader GM Saroori from Udhampur was aimed at cutting into the Congress’s Muslim votes – Saroori polled over 31000 votes – to boost Jitendra’s victory. And yet, after trailing Congress’s Lal Singh for quite some time, when Jitendra eventually won Udhampur it was with a margin far smaller than the BJP had hoped for.

One wonders whether the BJP’s victory margins in Jammu and Udhampur would have shrunk so substantially had the people truly been beneficiaries of the supposed gains that BJP claims have accrued to the Jammu region from the abrogation of Article 370 and Modi’s much talked about development push for Jammu and Kashmir.

Assembly elections

The shrinking of victory margins, arguably, also suggests that the BJP may not have an easy-going across the Assembly segments of the Jammu region if and when the Union Territory goes for Assembly polls. Jammu and Kashmir has not been able to elect its legislators for a decade now and, following a long legal battle, the Supreme Court has set a September 2024 deadline for the Assembly polls to be conducted in the UT.

The Centre and Election Commission have, however, evaded a clear response on whether they plan on honouring that deadline; maintaining only that restoring the Jammu and Kashmir voters’ right to vote is their ambition too.

Durbar shifting

The inordinate delay in conducting the Assembly polls has already instilled a deepening sense of disempowerment among Jammu and Kashmir’s voters. Modi’s decision to run the UT purely on the whims of an unaccountable and mostly inaccessible bureaucracy for the last five years has only amplified this sentiment as have a host of other decisions by the administration, led by Modi appointee Lt Governor Manoj Sinha, such as stopping the annual Durbar move from Srinagar to Jammu.

The Durbar move was started Dogra Ruler Hari Singh when the Civil Secretariat would operate out of Jammu during the winters. The practice naturally benefitted the Jammu region economically as the shift in the centre of administration also meant more people coming into Jammu and ushering in higher economic activity, from hotel bookings to shopping. The decision to stop the Durbar move also brought all of this economic activity to a grinding halt at a time when crippling unemployment and rising prices was already costing Jammu dear.

Administrative problems

The Sinha-led administration’s decision to switch to a system of auctioning liquor vends instead of allotting liquor licenses has also hit Jammu’s economy hard as locals involved in the trade for decades allege that the auction has been “hijacked” by cartel of “outsiders with deep pockets” against whom Jammu locals fail to compete. Similar allegations are being made with respect to granting of contracts for sand and gravel, which have also steeply increased the prices of construction in Jammu.

Contrary to the BJP’s claim of ushering transparency in administration and eliminating corrupt practices of the past, Jammu locals allege the current dispensation has ‘formalized’ administrative and financial impropriety. Like in other parts of the country, complaints of exam papers for government vacancy recruitment exams being leaked have become common in Jammu too. Questions have also been raised on the fairness and credibility of a recruitment agency Aptech, hired by the administration for recruitment in non-gazetted posts.

Warning for BJP

The BJP would do well to dwell on whether each of these factors contributed to the shrinking of its victory margins in Jammu and Udhampur instead of celebrating the wins for a third consecutive time. Tuesday’s result reflects that the two BJP bastions in the Jammu region have been breached and turning a blind eye to them would only hasten their crumbling down whenever elections to the state assembly are held.