Abdul Rashid Sheikh, Independent member of the Lok Sabha from Baramulla, goes by a widely known alias: Engineer Rashid. He has recently come to deserve another: Engineer X — alias attached to alias, engineer of X factors, coupling and decoupling electoral equations across the Valley and, many reckon, across the Banihal in the Chenab and Jammu regions as well.

Rashid’s home borough is Langate up in north Kashmir, the pivot on which he spun his startling Baramulla victory this summer; few believed he would skittle former chief minister Omar Abdullah and his former political boss, Sajad Lone of the People’s Conference, from behind the Tihar bars.

Few are now ready to bet that Rashid, bailed out on a court fiat for three weeks to barnstorm the Valley, will not cast his maverick fingerprint on the ballot beyond Baramulla.

It must mean something that former chief ministers and bitter foes Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, not to speak of his diminished mentor Sajad, have a common peeve this election — that Engineer Rashid has been let loose on the campaign.

Their jointly stapled perception is that the leader of the fledgling and unrecognised Awami Ittehad Party (AIP) can trigger imponderable changes in conventional voter behaviour and wreak ravage on the outcome.

“Rashid has no organisation to speak of nor any resources,” said a senior Kashmiri bureaucrat whose job it is to daily assess prospects, “but what he has, and few others do, is the perception that he is a victim of the State and yet he remains unafraid, a man in chains who will not stop barking grouses on behalf of Kashmiris, a man who speaks closest to Kashmiri mindset and sensibility.”

We run into the Engineer X caravan almost accidentally one balmy morning in the rural innards of south Kashmir, on a winding lane arriving from Pampore and running towards Pulwama, where the orchards are voluptuous with ripening apple and the rice fields golden with crop demanding to be taken down.

This is not Engineer territory, far from it. But the chaotic trail of pickups and tractor-trailers and jeeps and bikes is a sight to behold, and actually seek escape from. He sits in a dust-laden car, at the head of a convoy several kilometres long. Megaphones blare away, dust swirls from under the twisting wheels, the faithful — the Rashid faithful — rush about trying to cadge a handshake, or if not that, just and eye-to-eye moment.

“How many seats are you winning?” I ask, barely audible to him. “Winning? But I am going back to jail, I have come here to make other people win, may Kashmir win, that is why I am here.”

He pulls up the pane on the car window, the caravan glides on.

There’s a cold shiver running up and down Kashmir’s established nativist parties — the National Conference, the Peoples Democratic Party, even the People’s Conference — on what Rashid’s Baramulla victory and his physical presence on the battleground now could inspire elsewhere in Jammu and Kashmir.

A typical Rashid campaign vehicle depicting their leader behind bars in Pulwama in south Kashmir. Picture by Sankarshan Thakur

Rashid represents a sentiment and a constituency over which there can be little confusion — it is deeply, and fundamentally, anti-State.

The swollen voter numbers in the parliamentary elections, not just in Baramulla but across the Valley, indicated not an endorsement of the diminishment imposed in August 2019 as some claim but bubbling anger against the measure and what has
followed.

Rashid, or ideological outliers of his kind, may well be seen by the electorate as those who best represent public grouse and indignation. The core slogan of Rashid’s runaway Lok Sabha campaign — “Jail ka badla vote se lenge!” — probably comes
closest to capturing the predominant mood on the ground.

His Assembly campaign has been shrill and unrestrained. He speaks of “teaching a lesson” to (Narendra) Modi and (Amit) Shah, of “the will to grab back Kashmiri pride and rights”; he mocks Omar and Mehbooba alike for being “collaborators” against the Kashmiri people; he speaks in glowing terms of the slain Hizbul Mujahideen poster boy, Burhan Wani.

The unfettered defiance of his anti-New Delhi tone on the trail has led many to suspect that he is speaking out of “freedoms strategically granted to him by the powers”, from a guarantee that no harm will come to him.

“The fact that he was suddenly given bail and allowed to come to Kashmir, Rashid’s visible abundance of funds and resources for electioneering, that he can dare Delhi in the bluntest language, all of this makes us suspicious,” a senior National Conference leader told me.

“Our leaders (Farooq and Omar Abdullah) have spoken openly about this. Many believe Rashid has been planted by Delhi to queer this election, play their game. The more anti-India venom he spits, the more the BJP is able to consolidate the Hindu vote in the Jammu region. He is the Kashmiri enemy the BJP desperately needs in order to secure Jammu. Don’t lose sight of that. Rashid is casting his shadow beyond the Banihal.”

Rashid set out on his political journey in 2008. He rebelled against the People’s Conference — still flying the secessionist flag at the time — and decided to contest the Assembly elections as an Independent from Langate, his native patch in Baramulla.

He was then, as he remains in many ways, an oddball character convinced of an especially destined role. He had no party or followers. He had no resources of his own. He lived in a ramshackle shack whose floor was strewn hay and which shared a mud wall with a cowshed. He made it a statement of not wearing shoes and he reeked of bovine things.

Quite literally an unwashed entity, convinced he was on course to becoming a phenomenon. He exuded the sense of a man who had nothing to lose, particularly from his unvarnished and often too forthright and provocative manner of speaking.

He told me back in 2008: “We have become accustomed to being reduced to whatever the State wants to reduce us to; we have lost the shame of having ourselves reduced, that is who we are.”

At that time, everyone he met on his barefoot walking campaign, he asked for one rupee, no more. “I am not contesting this election,” he would tell me, “the people of Langate are.”

Nobody gave him a chance. He won Langate and went on to put a deeper emboss on the pocket than the Lones of the People’s Conference whose fiefdom it used to be. This summer, having felled Omar and Sajad, Rashid grabbed all of Baramulla, the only north Kashmir seat in Parliament. And now, many reckon, he has set himself for scoring bigger upsets.

“He may or may not win too many Assembly seats,” one elderly observer of Kashmiri politics told me in Srinagar. “But he will leave an imprint larger than the number of seats he takes; he will eat into chunks of votes here and there in a way that few would be able to tell what damage Engineer Rashid caused to who, especially now that he has formally allied with the Jamaat-e-Islami.”

As Jammu and Kashmir drifts towards an emaciated Assembly, it cannot be that many more, especially in the Valley, wouldn’t be tempted to embrace the Rashid example. Contest on a grievance ticket and make it a poll that few expected it to become — a flash-mob poll of unsung, unknown Kashmiri Independents.