Mehbooba Mufti was in her office in the Srinagar Civil Secretariat on Tuesday afternoon when news flashed that the BJP had ended the alliance with the PDP; also marking the sudden and surprising end to the 26-month rule of J&K’s first woman Chief Minister.
An official at the Civil Secretariat said the CM was shocked and asked the officials to confirm the news.
The alliance was a razor edge walk for both parties, which have opposing geneses, different vote banks, rivalling ideologies and no common ground.
The PDP, a party founded in 1999 by a former leader of the Congress and Mehbooba’s father Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, based its politics on soft separatism and remained vocal on causes which overlapped with those of the region’s separatists. The BJP remained on the far-end of political spectrum and campaigned against the PDP and the NC during the Assembly polls.
The decision to form the alliance between the PDP and the BJP had angered the voters and leaders of both parties with Mehbooba describing it as a “courageous but unpopular decision”. She herself was a reluctant Chief Minister.
In the closing quarter of March 2016, Mehbooba – lonely and nervous after the death of her father two months ago — decided to take oath as the Chief Minister and also to continue the alliance of her party with the BJP.
The alliance had already taken a toll on the party’s popularity in its strongholds across south Kashmir which had actually become a no-go zone for the PDP, other political parties and the mainstream ideology.
The alliance between was architected by Mufti Sayeed, a career politician and former Union Home Minister who had devised the “Healing Touch” policy to win the hearts of war-weary people of the state and was an ardent supporter of friendly Indo-Pakistan ties.
The coming together of the two parties, however, was surprising and an unlikely outcome of the 2014 elections which saw a hung Assembly.
The two parties stitched together a common minimum programme and named it the Agenda of Alliance. The Agenda document had set a tall and demanding order for a government which could never dig its heels, could never get a respite from controversies, slipped frequently into crises and was not able to maintain a lengthy period of calm.
The Agenda promised “smart governance”, economic growth with regional balance and social justice, peace and stability and also self-sustaining and balanced development across all three regions. The political and security initiatives agreed in the Agenda were also of a tall order and, at times, utopian.
The Agenda, however, became a source of friction within the alliance instead of a guide to governance as the coalition government had a face-off with controversies and crises from the beginning.
The biggest crisis faced by the coalition was the aftermath of killing of militant commander Burhan which led to widespread and violent protests across the Kashmir valley and forced a shutdown of the region for almost six months. The most recent crisis which rocked the coalition was the rape and murder of a minor girl in Jammu’s Kathua district in which the PDP and the BJP were on the opposing sides. As the crisis led to protests in favour of the victim as well as the accused, two BJP ministers had to quit for participating in a rally to demand a CBI probe into the incident.
Two and a half hours after the BJP backed out from the coalition with the PDP, Mehbooba spoke to the media at her residence and appeared lost at the cause of the failure of the coalition. She said the alliance was “against the wishes of people” but was carefully drafted “with vision and wisdom”.
As Mehbooba spoke of the possible causes, she was not exact about the final trigger – a reflection of the swiftness and the blitz with which the reluctant coalition fell apart.
Rocked by crises
The biggest crisis faced by the coalition was the aftermath of militant commander Burhan Wani’s killing which led to violent protests across Kashmir
The most recent crisis was the rape and murder of a minor girl in Kathua district in which the PDP and the BJP were on the opposing sides.
