Prospects of NC, PDP bleak in the Valley

While the PAGD will contest the elections together there are several reasons as to why the prospects of the alliance look weak

It is official. The Farooq Abdullah-led National Conference (NC) and the Mehbooba Mufti Saeed-led Peoples' Democratic Party (PDP) have formalised an electoral alliance for the Assembly polls likely to be held in the Union Territory (UT) of Jammu and Kashmir this year.

Observers say the Election Commission of India has set in motion the preparations for holding Assembly polls in Jammu and Kashmir, the first since the Centre revoked its special status and made it a union territory. The Commission will publish the finalised electoral rolls of Jammu and Kashmir on October 31, the union territory's first voters' list after the boundaries of the Assembly seats were redrawn.

National Conference president Farooq Abdullah has declared that the People's Alliance for the Gupkar Declaration (PAGD), of which his party is a major constituent, "will contest the elections together." This announcement has been welcomed by the PDP, another major constituent of the alliance.

Prospects of the alliance in the upcoming Assembly elections are bleak. The alliance has turned very weak over the last couple of years. To begin with, it was an amalgam of seven parties that sought to fight for the restoration of the pre-August 5, 2019 position of Jammu and Kashmir. It came into being on August 4, 2019, a day ahead of the reading down of Article 370.

The group today stands too fragmented to go to the polls with a united voice. The other day, J&K Peoples Movement quit the Gupkar alliance. Earlier, the Congress and the J&K Peoples Conference quit the amalgamation. The Congress dissociated itself from the alliance after it found that the statements made by the leaders of the NC and the PDP on Article 370 in 2019 made the party's position uncomfortable outside J&K in its poll campaigns. The JKPC quit the alliance after it won the highest 110 segments in the first-ever District Development Council polls in 2021.

Now the PAGD is a mere four-party grouping--the NC, the PDP, the CPI(M) and the Awami National Conference (ANC). In fact, operationally, the alliance is an electoral alliance of just two political parties-NC and the PDP.

Most importantly, the NC and the PDP have turned highly unpopular across the whole public spectrum. The masses --- the minorities and the Dalits, in particular - in the region have never forgotten how such parties used the once 'special status' of J&K to deny them any development. The masses would never like the parties, such as the NC and the PDP, to come back to power and do what they aspire most-the same special status of the region.

(Jagdish N. Singh is a senior journalist based in New Delhi. He is also Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, New York)

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