Ahmed Ali Fayyaz/Srinagar

On March 5, Nasir Aslam Wani, vice-president of the National Conference (NC) made it clear that Farooq Abdullah’s party would contest the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections independently on all three seats in Kashmir.

Wani’s announcement meant that NC was not ready for seat sharing with the INDIA alliance constituents -Congress and Mehbooba Mufti’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the valley.

Over the week, Congress leaders held informal talks with the PDP to resolve this issue. PDP has been keen to contest the Anantnag-Poonch seat with support from INDIA constituents - NC, CPM, and Congress.

Recently, Omar Abdullah reiterated Wani’s stand at his press conference and reaffirmed that his party was not ready to concede Anantnag to the PDP.

Omar said if the basic idea of forging the Congress-led INDIA alliance was to defeat the BJP, the PDP must concede as it is certainly not in a winning position in any of the 6 seats in the Union Territories of J&K and Ladakh. 

He argues that J&K’s three seats -Srinagar, Baramulla, and Anantnag-are already with INDIA and, therefore, they needed to work on seat sharing on three seats – Jammu, Udhampur, and Ladakh, which are with the BJP.

In the Lok Sabha elections of 2014 and 2019, the BJP was returned to both the seats of Jammu and Udhampur with massive margins. In 2019, it also won Ladakh. 

Congress had emerged at the number two position in all three seats.

Omar contends that based on the results of the two previous elections, the NC should contest all three Kashmir seats and the Congress on the two seats of Jammu and one seat of Ladakh. 

However, the PDP believes it has a high stake in Anantnag, the native district of its founder Mohammad Mohammad Sayeed. Mufti and his family members and relatives have contested most of their elections from Anantnag.

Mufti was returned to Lok Sabha from Muzaffarnagar, U.P, in 1989. However, right from 1960, Anantnag has been the headquarters of Mufti’s politics. In 1998, he won his first Lok Sabha election in J&K from Anantnag as a Congress leader. Thereafter, it was the only parliamentary constituency in Kashmir where PDP gave a tough fight to NC.

The PDP had been getting tacit support from the Jamaat-e-Islami. In the Assembly elections of 2002, Mufti’s party has been winning most of its seats from the same area. However, the JeI-dominated segments in Pulwama and Shopian have been shifted into the Srinagar constituency in the recent delimitation.

Omar has often referred to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in which the NC’s Hasnain Masoodi was returned and the Congress candidate was at the number two position. PDP was in the third position. He says it would be just a travesty of reason logic and strategy to keep away the NC and Congress out of the contest for pleasing PDP.

“Which (brand of) politics says that the parties which stood at number one and number two in the last parliamentary election should cede the contest to a party which was at number three and that too on a seat where their influence is nowhere to be seen,” Omar told reporters on 9 March.

However, Omar was soft on Congress. He said, “We are not forcing anyone. If Sonia Gandhi Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra or Rahul Gandhi contest from there, we will happily vacate it without hesitation. But since we have won the seat, we will not leave it for any other party. It is our right,” he said.

The BJP has been strongly eying the South Kashmir Lok Sabha seat since 2019. The opposition has viewed the recent demarcation of the South Kashmir constituency—in which Jammu division’s Nowshera, Rajouri, Budhal, Thannamandi, Surankote, Poonch, and Mendhar Assembly segments have been clubbed with Anantnag—as ‘an act of social engineering’ by the government.

Granting the status of Scheduled Tribe to the Paharis, whose largest habitat in J&K is in the district of Rajouri and Poonch, as also reserving 9 Assembly segments for STs, is also ascribed to the BJP’s strategy of winning the South Kashmir Lok Sabha seat.

Omar said that his party had conveyed to the Congress that there was “not much scope” for negotiations with the PDP on seat sharing in J&K. “We didn’t push out the PDP. The situation has kept the party out of this election,” he said.

Senior NC leaders, not wishing to be named, blamed the PDP for initiating the breaking up of both - the Peoples Alliance for Gupkar Declaration (PAGD) and the INDIA. Mehbooba’s confidante Waheed-ur-Rehman had first publically blamed Farooq Abdullah’s party for rigging the Assembly elections in 1987. This was followed by Mehbooba’s daughter and media advisor Iltija Mufti who compared the recent poll rigging in Pakistan with that of the Assembly elections of 1987 in Kashmir.

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So this has essentially meant the end of INDIA alliance in Kashmir while the chances of collaboration between NC and PDP in the other three seats are alive.