Unsurprisingly, the Union territory of Jammu and Kashmir has spoken in divergent voices — Jammu has invested robustly in the Bharatiya Janata Party, Kashmir has refused the BJP the slightest inroad, directly or through stray groups that had come to be widely considered proxy players acting at New Delhi’s covert command. The latter is clearly the overriding message of the mandate: outright rejection of a barely disguised bid by the Establishment to divide the vote and ensure a splintered assembly. The Valley voters clearly saw through the design and acted collectively and astutely to deliver a clear majority to the National Conference-Congress alliance. The verdict has insulated the new assembly from mala fide manipulation of the kind that many suspected would come into play in a house without a clear winner. The lieutenant-governor’s power to nominate five members of the legislative assembly with full voting rights could, for instance, have been used to install an unlikely regime but one that would suit the political ends of the BJP whose openly bragged ambition it has been — especially since the epochal decisions of August 5, 2019 — to form a government in Jammu and Kashmir. The allowance to elements like the jailed Baramulla member of Parliament, Engineer Rashid, to not only get out on bail and campaign but also strike a political alliance with the Jamaat-e-Islami, was also part of the effort to fracture the vote and leave the NC-Congress alliance, the most credible claimant to power, short of the finish line.
But this victory sets the NC-Congress alliance on a steep and rocky path of challenges, not least of which will be functioning with a little more than municipal powers under a lieutenant-governor most likely to be adversarial. The consistent friction between the Aam Aadmi Party government and a succession of lieutenant-governors in Delhi comes to mind. Aligning Jammu, too, will prove demanding. The NC must also worry about its manifesto pitch and some of the high-voltage but improbable promises it has made. Neither grant of statehood nor the restoration of Article 370 (on which the Congress remains pertinently silent) is within the powers of the new government. The NC has interpreted the Valley verdict as fundamentally against the August 5, 2019 decisions, it is an interpretation that will likely come to haunt the NC.
