Kashmir’s People’s Democratic Party chief Mehbooba Mufti was formally elected leader of the PDP Legislature Party on Thursday, paving the way for her to emerge as J&K’s first woman chief minister. Ms Mufti will be in coalition with the BJP, with which she conducted a fairly pointless public relations war for two and a half months in the hope of extracting outward concessions from the party ruling the Centre so that she may have something to show to her constituents in the Valley.
This became necessary — and the PDP leader’s perception was valid in this regard — because the first 10 months of the PDP-BJP coalition government led by her late father Mufti Sayeed, who passed away in early January, had left a harvest of bitterness.
Much to Mufti Sayeed’s frustration, little heed was paid by the BJP to the so-called Agenda of Alliance, while on issue after issue the saffron party sought to highlight friction points between the largely Hindu Jammu region of the state and the almost entirely Muslim Kashmir Valley. There was little the Mufti could do except to appeal to the BJP’s good sense. He was a stalwart and understood that walking away from the government was not an option. That would have led to instability in a sensitive state. It would also have spread confusion among his party’s MLAs, who have made little secret of their desire to enjoy the perks of office.
After her father’s demise, Ms Mufti was in an extremely delicate situation. She appreciated that the alliance government had courted unpopularity by the day and this would hurt her regional outfit in the long run. But it was also evident to her that her legislators were in no mood to walk away from power. Even though the BJP made it public that it did not bend on any of Ms Mufti’s so-called confidence-building demands, the PDP leader agreed in the end to play ball, possibly in disregard of her better political instincts.
She had to remain content with a symbolic meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi after being strong-armed by BJP president Amit Shah. Perhaps she did this in order to prevent internal cracks in her party from surfacing. The Jammu region and the Kashmir Valley inhabit two very different political spaces. The justification given for the PDP’s alliance with the BJP — in which the North Pole met the South Pole, to recall Mufti Sayeed’s pithy description — was to lessen the gap between the needs and perceptions of the two vital regions. It would behove the BJP to remain mindful of this in India’s larger interest.
