Jammu and Kashmir: Into the Limbo of Governors Rule

Sukumar Muralidharan,
15 January 2015
Elections have been a strategy of integration in India, periodic contests in which
social groups bid for power and occupy ruling and oppositional spaces for agreed
tenures. In Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), the strategy has taken a quite distinct shape.
But the recent election to the J&K state assembly has led to the limbo of Governors
rule, showing that the fault-lines in the state can at most support the burden of three
cornered electoral contests. Beyond that number, the rifts acquire perhaps
unmanageable proportions.
Kashmirs evolution from a one-party state to the semblance of a competitive arena
has been a slow one. Elections were once held without contest: referendum style
processes involving an up or down vote, most often determined in advance. The
Congress party was then the only party with legitimacy in Delhi and it ruled first by
appropriating the identity of Sheikh Abdullahs National Conference (NC) and then
enfolding him within its capacious structures of patronage.
A little later, an apparent choice was offered between two parties that in reality
functioned as one. A quantum leap was achieved in 2002, when the Congress and
NC decided to go their own ways rather than work together in collusion to corner
both the ruling and opposition spaces. The arrival of a third player at just that time
built an additional prop under fragile electoral foundations. An indecisive outcome
produced a creative response, with the Congress splitting the six-year chief
ministerial term equally with the new entrant, Mufti Mohammad Sayeeds Peoples
Democratic Party (PDP). The bargaining process was tough, only consummated
after a brief spell of Governors rule.
Elections to the state assembly in 2008 were held after prolonged agitation against
an official move to hand over a portion of land within Kashmir as the permanent
patrimony of a temple trust. The PDP alliance with the Congress had collapsed and
the NC, now into its third generation of leadership under the Abdullah dynasty,
secured an easy passage back to power.

Patronage democracy, the unflattering epithet invented by the economist Pranab

Bardhan in the 1980s to sum up aspects of Indias electoral history, has a specific
relevance in J&K. Getting a reasonable number out to the ballot boxes was always a
challenge in the state. While longer term issues bequeathed by the partition of 1947
persisted in the political imagination, the Kashmiri people had little incentive to confer
legitimacy on the limited electoral choices offered. But the arrival of three players in
the electoral arena marked a shift. At stake now was the opportunity to control levers
of patronage for six years, a prospect that led to an escalation of competition,
inducing more people to come out to the polling booths.
The addition of a third player to Kashmirs electoral arena, one who could be trusted
to stay within the rules and not declare an explicit secessionist intent, was a strategic
master-stroke, engineered with some finesse by the intelligence agencies. But the
electoral arena in J&K seemingly could not take a fourth player without risk of tipping
over into a zone of renewed uncertainty. Unfortunately, ambitions unbound within the
BJP after its absolute majority won in Indias parliament, did not admit for any such
nuance.
Project 45, the strategy unveiled by BJP president Amit Shah, referring to the
number required for an absolute majority in J&Ks assembly, seemed a viable
strategy at least as portrayed in the louder and more blustery quarters of the Indian
media. In 2014 parliamentary elections, the BJP had won both seats in Jammu as
also the solitary Ladakh constituency. With the neutral veneer of development
recently applied over its sectarian identity, the BJP seemed to have a realistic
chance of winning a few assembly seats in Kashmir too.
The basic statistics of the election are clear enough: the BJP won the largest share
of the popular vote, but turned up second in seats won. The PDP won a few votes
less than the BJP, but ended up with a few seats more. Traditional power brokers
the Congress and NC both turned in weaker performances than before though
not quite so bad as to take them out of the power bargain.
Beyond this, a breakdown shows how deeply polarised the outcome has been. Of
the BJPs 1.1 million votes, fewer than 48,000 were from the Kashmir valley: it won
over 93 percent of its votes in Jammu, forfeited its deposit in all but one seat in
Kashmir and failed to win anything in Ladakh. The PDPs performance was likewise

skewed towards the Kashmir valley but nowhere near as lopsided: roughly 27
percent of its total votes came from the Jammu region, where it did succeed in
winning two seats.
The complex arithmetic of the electoral outcome makes it difficult extracting a stable
ruling arrangement. The Congress won 61 percent of its total vote and four of its 12
seats from Jammu, while also sweeping all four seats in the Ladakh region. It has
offered its unconditional support, but its tally does not quite put the PDP over the
threshold of 45 in the state assembly.
Recognising tough realities, the PDPs Mufti Sayeed grasped the nettle and entered
into talks with the BJP. But opposition from within remains strong with the very real
prospect that bringing the BJP into the structures of governance would undermine
J&Ks long established power-sharing compact. Organiser, the weekly mouthpiece
of the BJPs ideological fraternity, underlined this point in a recent issue, when it
deprecated the small population of Kashmiris which suffered from superiority
complex and were out into the streets of Srinagar for demanding a Kashmir centric
coalition.
Following his resignation as caretaker chief minister and the imposition of Governors
rule, Omar Abdullah sprang a surprise by offering his support to a PDP-led ministry.
But the PDP was quick to spurn that offer, extending the uncertainty and underlining
that the single most ominous outcome of the recent election has been the removal of
the conjunctive between Jammu and Kashmir.