Three Cheers for Democracy

THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF elections for the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) Legislative Assembly by the Election Commission (EC) will crown the steady march of democracy in the erstwhile province that was once subject to secessionist terror. Assembly elections are the third in the series of democratic exercises that began with the elec­tions to the District Development Councils (DDCs) in late 2020, a year after the constitutional changes made on August 4, 2019.

Assembly elections will be held in three phases beginning Sep­tember 18 and ending on October 1. The results will be declared on October 4. The Assembly has 114 seats of which 24 are reserved for constituencies in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. After the Delimita­tion Commission issued its report in May 2022, six more seats were added in the Jammu division and one more in the Kashmir division for a total of 90 seats for which elections will be held. In its judgment on the Article 370 case, the Supreme Court ordered EC to complete the electoral process in J&K by the end of September. EC has stuck to its own schedule, after consultations with the J&K administra­tion and the Centre, and the elections will continue after the end of the deadline set by the Apex court. EC has its own constitutional mandate and it has firmly asserted its authority.

Within days of the election schedule being announced, the so-called mainstream parties in the Union territory (UT) have swung into action. The J&K People’s Democratic Party (PDP) led by Mehbooba Mufti has already announced eight candidates, while the National Conference (NC) has issued its election manifesto.

It is interesting to note the changing attitude of these parties to elections in J&K. After August 5, 2019—when these leaders were detained for a year—they had openly stated that they would not participate in elections unless constitutional changes made on August 4, 2019, were rolled back. Mufti had said that unless Article 370 was restored, she would not participate in elections in J&K. For his part, Omar Abdullah of NC had said that he would not contest elections unless statehood was restored to J&K.

Now, both parties and their workers—who have not tasted power for five years—are doubling down on preparations for elections.

What has changed in the past five years to force a rethink on these obdurate attitudes towards democracy is the vast improve­ment in the security situation and the careful attention to eco­nomic issues, such as tourism and investment, especially during the tenure of Manoj Sinha as the lieutenant governor of J&K. Now, green shoots of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) can be seen. Last year, a West Asian business conglomerate decided to pump in ` 500 crore in Kashmir. This is a drop com­pared to the vast sums poured into other states but given the history of terrorism, it is a big forward step. Similarly, last year the number of tourists visiting J&K crossed the two-crore mark for the first time. The secu­rity situation tells its own positive story.

It is something of a myth that there was no ‘political normalisation’ in J&K and with the announcement of the Assembly elections, this process is finally on after five long years of ‘democratic drought’. The reality is very different even if politicians in the UT and commentators refuse to see it.

The first steps in ushering in representation for the people were taken way back in late November 2020 when elections for 20 DDCs were held. DDCs are a novel experiment in grassroots democracy in J&K when the Assembly elections had not been held and there was no Assembly for the UT. Each DDC has 14 elected members for a total of 280 members spread across 20 DDCs in J&K. These elections witnessed extensive participation by parties across the spectrum. The PAGD group, as it originally stood, won 110 seats and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 75. A large number of independent candidates—50 in all—also won elections to DDCs.

These elections were successful and the extent of voting ranged from 48 per cent to 57 per cent across eight phases of the elections. Yet, this level of participation—by voters and political parties—did not prevent criticism of DDCs as more ‘disempowering’ instead of a key democratic exercise they were. A senior leader of PDP, Naeem Akhtar, said as much: “The aim is total depoliticisation so that there is no central collective voice. It is to cut to size the people of Jammu and Kashmir so that they don’t have a politicalvoice.” The statement was madein October 2020, roughly a month before the DDC polls began.

In the event, the people of the UT participated in the elections with gusto. The voting percentages, while a tad lower than those usually seen in other states, were high by the standards of the insur­gency-marred Valley districts. Kashmir has a history of political violence spe­cifically targeting representatives who man the institutions that are closer to the people—village panchayats and district-level bodies—in contrast to the relatively lower level of targeting experienced at the Assembly and parliamentary levels.

It was not surprising that elite opinion in the Valley did not like the idea of DDCs. The ideal situation for so-called mainstream par­ties there has been to keep power centralised in Srinagar in the hands of legislators. They feared that DDCs would undercut the Legislative Assembly whenever it was resuscitated. An unsaid fear was and remains that with these district-level institutions, people’s concerns about development and other day-to-day issues would begin to dominate the democratic agenda in the UT. This would be at the cost of ‘issues’ like identity and ‘sovereignty’ that created havoc in J&K for three decades.

Earlier in the same year—on March 6, 2020—the Centre noti­fied the appointment of the Delimitation Commission. Origi­nally, the ambit of the Commission was wider and included other states as well. But later, it focused on J&K. Much like their attitude towards DDC elections, the so-called mainstream parties were hostile to the Delimitation Commission as well. Two months later, on May 9, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla nominated members of Parliament (MPs) to the Commission, including three from NC. The next day, NC supremo Farooq Abdullah rejected the proposal and refused to participate in the proceedings of the Commission. A year later, PDP also refused to participate in the deliberations of the Commission. In any delimitation exercise, nominees of political parties participate in the process as associate members. This is part and parcel of the democratic process.

Mehbooba Mufti of PDP had said that unless Article 370 was restored, she would not participate in elections in J&K. For his part, Omar Abdullah of NC had said he would not contest elections unless statehood was restored. Now, both parties are doubling down on preparations for elections

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Matters did not end there. In February 2022, NC rejected the second draft report of the Delimitation Commission. PDP also rejected the report of the Commission with the party chief Mehbooba Mufti describing the delimitation exercise as, “tactical process of rigging before the elections.” She added: “That’s what they have done, converting the majority into a minority, in favour of BJP. We have not even participated in the discussions of the Delimitation Commission.” She made her remarks in the wake of the Supreme Court dismissing a challenge to the appointment of the Commission on February 13, 2023. (These remarks were reported in The Indian Express on the same day as the apex court delivered its verdict).

Yet, a year later, in 2024, all mainstream parties in J&K— including the ones that opposed delimitation tooth and nail, par­ticipated in the Lok Sabha elections with enthusiasm that was strangely at odds with their attitude since 2020. But it was also an eye-opener for these parties. In the newly delimited Anantnag- Rajouri Lok Sabha constituency, PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti was trounced by Mian Altaf Ahmad of NC by a margin of more than 2.8 lakh votes. Ahmad (67) has a great deal of traction among Gujjar and Bakerwal Scheduled Tribe communities who dominate the Poonch and Rajouri areas that were added to the constituency while Pulwama, a volatile region of South Kashmir, was transferred to the Srinagar constituency. When the result was declared, Mufti—who has her political base in Anantnag district—lost. Something similar transpired in the Baramulla seat where Omar Abdullah, the scion of the Abdullah dynasty, lost by more than two lakh votes to Engineer Rashid, a separatist politician who contested the election from custody.

It is interesting to note that the voting percentage in Anant­nag-Rajouri in 2024 stood at 51.35 per cent compared to 8.98 per cent in 2019, the last Lok Sabha election, marking an increase of a whopping 42.37 percentage points. This is nothing short of a miracle in a constituency that was at the heart of the secessionist insurgency for a very long time. Something similar transpired in Baramulla which witnessed a turnout of 59.1 per cent in 2024 compared to 34.6 per cent in 2019, an impressive increase of 24.5 percentage points.

What explains this renewal of faith in democracy? One obvi­ous answer is the vast improvement in the security situation in the Kashmir Valley districts. Back in 2019, when the voter turnout in Anantnag was abysmally low, the fear of reprisals at the hands of terrorists was so acute that people did not want to venture out of their homes. In Bijbehara, a town that was the hotbed of separatist violence, people who were willing to vote were unwilling to risk their lives in case the polling stations were distant from the main roads that were extensively patrolled by paramilitary forces.

Five years later, there was a vast change in the security situation. The data speaks for itself. In the five years from 2015 to 2019, there were 702 incidents of killings in J&K, a figure that went down to 552 between 2020 and 2024 (until August 24). This is a reduction of 27 per cent in the number of such incidents. The number of civilian deaths went down from 215 (between 2015 and 2019) to 129 (from 2020 to 2024), a reduction of 66 per cent. The decrease in these two categories has been particularly sharp in 2023 and 2024. The more visible markers of turbulence in Kashmir, such as incidents of stone pelting and hartals called by secessionist groups, have disappeared for good. In 2023, there were no incidents of stone pelting and hartals. In comparison, this number was 1,458 in 2018 and stood even higher at 2,653 in 2016 when there was an elected government in the erstwhile state.

What is noteworthy, from an electoral perspective, is the distribution of terrorist incidents since 2019. At one time, the vast majority of terrorist violence took place in the Valley districts from Kupwara in the north to the last sub-division of Anantnag district. After 2019, this pattern has reversed slowly but steadily: now, the Valley districts are quiescent but terrorism fuelled by infiltration of Pakistani terrorist groups has gone up in the re­mote reaches of districts like Doda in the Jammu division. This is apart from the sporadic violence due to such incursions in the extreme north of J&K. The better security situation in the Valley districts shows in the higher voting turnout, be it in the DDC elections or the recent Lok Sabha elections. For all practical pur­poses, J&K is on the path to normalcy, a process that has taken immense effort on the part of security forces and the Centre.

Yet, the ‘mainstream’ parties in J&K are unhappy at this restoration of peace and an atmosphere conducive to econom­ic growth and development. This is pretty evident from the manifesto of NC and the statements made by leaders of PDP who continue to harp on the “need to talk with Pakistan.” This is jarring but beyond a point it does not matter: these parties, despite their opposition to every democratic move in the past five years, have ultimately participated in all elections from those for DDCs to Parliament. They are getting ready to participate in Assembly elections now: the prize is irresistible even if their futile rhetoric continues unabated. What matters in the end is peace and the beneficiaries are the people of J&K.

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Siddharth Singh

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