Whether or not there is an element of manipulation in the creation of the Engineer Rashid factor in the Jammu and Kashmir legislative assembly elections, it is benefitting the BJP in two ways. 

One, as is the popular perception, it is fragmenting votes in Kashmir Valley and limiting the electoral arithmetic of the traditional regional parties. More importantly, it is enabling BJP to weaponise it in Jammu region to consolidate votes, particularly in the region’s Hindu heartland which goes to vote on October 1. 

The candidates in the fray in the elections from the Valley – 34 by Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party, a dozen-odd by Jamaat-e-Islami, and individuals like Sarjan Barkati – are not only seen as pro-separatist. Some of their election campaigning pitches are high on the rhetoric of the resolution of Kashmir, unlike that of traditional regional parties like the National Conference and People’s Democratic Party that are sticking to restoration of Article 370 or statehood.

While these slogans are enticing sections of people in the Valley, particularly the youth, their reverberation from a distance in the plains of Jammu is impacting the voters on the ground differently. 

In its rallies, the BJP has been openly targeting the NC, PDP, Congress and even ‘friendlies’ like the Apni Party and Sajad Lone’s People’s Conference. But it’s chosen silence over Rashid, Jamaat and other sundry mysterious and surprise contestants in these elections, giving more depth to the speculations of engineering and facilitating the chaotic electoral contests. 

Conspiracy theories have always abounded in the Kashmir Valley but what gives this one more teeth is the data of the contestants per constituency. While the average size of contestants per constituency in the Valley is more than 10, it is between six and seven in Jammu, which has also been largely apolitical and is characterised by a political vacuum for decades – unlike Kashmir. 

There are many paradoxes that BJP’s electioneering campaign throws up.   

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who made the odd choice of addressing a huge rally from Srinagar even though BJP has no strong candidates on the ground in the Valley, went hammer and tongs against what he called ‘dynasties’ but remained conspicuously silent on Rashid’s party or Jamaat. While the BJP’s election narrative equates any talk of autonomy with terrorism and anti-nationalism, the party is interestingly not saying much about the slogans of resolving Kashmir or the referendum. 

However, within Jammu, the BJP is weaponising regional faultlines and pivoting its narrative to terrorism. Through door-to-door campaigns and community reach-out, the party, which is going hyper-local, is whipping up a frenzy against what it calls the ‘separatist’ aspirations of Rashid and Jamaat. Both are already seen as polarising figures within Jammu – Jamaat for its ideology and Rashid for his outbursts. 

In the Hindu-majority districts of Jammu province, the traditional regional faultlines in the erstwhile state and Kashmiri domination in politics have always created a sense of inferiority, even discrimination. There is an overwhelming aspiration to break the Kashmiri hegemony that has existed for years. Despite that, a lack of leadership within the Jammu region has left it with little choice but to align with the more acceptable Kashmir-based traditional parties, particularly the National Conference.

Rashid and Jamaat, however, do not fit the bill. They are being used by the BJP as red rags to invoke a sense of fear in Jammu, enabling the party to consolidate the Hindu vote bank, despite the profound sense of disillusionment and heightened levels of anti-incumbency it faces. 

To put it simply: the BJP is killing two birds with one stone. It is using the ‘pro-separatist hardliners’ to fragment the Muslim majority in Kashmir Valley, as well as consolidate its Hindu vote bank.  

The delimitation process, which carved more Hindu majority constituencies, already tilted the balance in favour of the BJP. And the Jammu province will likely play a more decisive role in the formation of the government. 

But here’s the paradox: While Jammu’s 43 seats – including 24 that go to polls on October 1, along with the hotly contested 16 seats in North Kashmir – will play a crucial role in the political arithmetic, Jammu has been missing in the campaigning narrative even within the region. Unlike the Valley’s multi-cornered contests, Jammu’s contest is primarily a direct one between Congress and the BJP, particularly in the Hindu majority districts.

There are, however, exceptions. 

Many constituencies in Jammu province’s Muslim-majority hill districts are braced for a three-cornered contest. This is for reasons ranging from the failure of the Congress-NC alliance in key constituencies, the PDP factor, and other surprise entries in the contest. And in the rest of Jammu province, it is the Congress banking on the anti-incumbency factor without any substantive discourse and the BJP whipping up a frenzy over its usual cocktail of hypernationalism, terrorism and anti-Kashmir rhetoric.

Jammu, whose four out of five districts are Muslim majority, is far more diverse and complex than the Valley and throws up the challenges of competing diverse aspirations. However, even the common agendas of development, economy and basic issues of sadak, bijli and paani are missing in the discourse. While the BJP has tried to sell to the rest of India and the world a positive narrative of peace, development and democracy, it clearly has nothing to show on its report card to its local constituency in Jammu. 

The voter certainly knows the ground realities more than all the corporate television channels peddling the government narrative, and the BJP-RSS’s robust online propaganda machinery. The people of Jammu, reeling under the insecurity of the absence of constitutional protections concerning land, jobs and businesses, understand the mismatch of this rhetoric with reality. 

Seen in isolation, the BJP’s patent tool of ‘terrorism’ would find little currency in Jammu where anxieties over increasing terror attacks in Pir Panjal, Chenab Valley, Kathua, Udhampur and Jammu have been building up since 2019. Despite the BJP’s promise of ending terrorism, the post-2019 developments have brought it right to their doorstep. Reports of BJP’s cadres comprising ex-militants further make the BJP’s old tried and tested formula of using terrorism as a pretext no longer convincing for the party’s traditional vote bank in Jammu. 

The juxtaposition of the Rashid and Jamaat factor, however, enables the BJP to showcase its anti-terrorism rhetoric in a new package to invoke the fear of ‘Kashmiri hegemony’, ‘separatism’, ‘terrorism’, and ‘Pakistan’ – terminologies that are blurred in the imagination of the confused voters. 

Such calls for unity in Jammu have ironically robbed Jammu of agency and have virtually turned the voter mass into a pawn of its electoral strategy centred around hyper-nationalism, while allowing their own aspirations to be subsumed at its altar. The BJP is once again attempting to do the same.

Will the voters in Jammu end up being gullible? Or will they see through the ruse of BJP using its usual playbook tactic to dilute the more dominant issues of unemployment, dwindling trade and anxieties over land that have come to define the region? 

The answer will be out in a few days.  

Anuradha Bhasin is the Managing Editor of Kashmir Times and author of ‘A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After Article 370’ (Harper Collins, December 2022).

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