Hung assembly is premier problem

Inder Malhotra

TWO thousand fourteen has been a year of elections in India. More conspicuously it has also been the year of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. For, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s spectacular victory in the Lok Sabha polls was almost entirely his, not the party's. The pattern continued during the state assembly elections that followed. He remained the BJP's sole campaigner everywhere. Consequently, the BJP emerged as the largest party in Maharashtra and stunningly won Haryana, where the party hardly existed. In the latest elections in Jammu and Kashmir and Jharkhand, the results have been mixed though, it is correct to say that the “Modi Year ended on Modi Note”. Several newspaper headlines sum up the situation: “Modi wins Jharkhand, hung verdict in J&K”. Some others say “Kingmaker in one, King in another”. The triumph in Jharkhand is important no doubt and the BJP has increased its presence in the Jammu and Kashmir assembly substantially. Yet the fragmented verdict in this state has become an acute problem. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that at present it outweighs everything else.
For one thing, Kashmir has almost always been a difficult state to govern, and the Union Government has been reluctant to place it under President’s rule. The performance of the BJP, the People’s Democratic Party, the National Conference, and the Congress has been such as to make the formation of a new government in the state more difficult than it appears. It is noteworthy that although the BJP won the largest percentage of votes, it was the PDP that emerged as the largest party in the assembly, winning 28 seats, with the BJP closely behind with 25 seats. The National Conference, led by Omar Abdullah, was almost certain to be defeated. For all other parties were against it because of its record during its incumbency of six years. (Ironically, both the Congress and the NC had announced long before the elections the end of their alliance, each side claiming that it was the first to take this decision.  Yet ministers of both parties stuck to their chairs.)
All through the electioneering both Mehbooba Mufti, leader of the PDP, and Omar Abdullah constantly declared that an alliance with the BJP was “out of the question”. Now both sides seem to have no objection to joining hands with the saffron party. Only the Congress party is asking the PDP, especially its patron-in-chief Mufti Sayeed, whether he would form an alliance with a communal BJP or with the secular parties. Their calculation is that with the PDP's 28 member, the NC’s 15 and the Congress's 12, a stable and secular government can be easily formed. On this Omar's stand is that if Nitish Kumar and Laloo Prasad could get together, so could he and his rival, the Mufti. He has added, however, that he would take no initiative. It was for Mufti Sayeed to do so. Nor has he ruled out his acceptance of an alliance with the BJP, if it is proposed by the saffron party. After all, the NC had joined such an alliance in the past and he himself was a minister of state for external affairs in Atal Bihari Vajpaee’s government. 
For his part, BJP president Amit Shah told a press conference that for his party “all options are open”. It could form a government of its own - for this it would need the support of Omar Abdullah, the two-member party of its ally, Sajjad Lone, and of some independents — or support some other government, or even join someone else’s government.
It is remarkable that all political parties have since taken up Amit Shah’s slogan of “All options being open”. However, as of now, things are moving towards the BJP joining a PDP-led government in J&K because such a government would be most stable and give the BJP a share in the governance of a crucial state from which it has been excluded so far. But, as someone rightly remarked, “conditions will apply”. The rotation of the office of Chief Minister between the two partners is not the most difficult of problems. What could be much harder to handle is the BJP's need and demand for a delimitation of constituencies in the state. The present state of affairs, according to the ruling party at the Centre, gives the Kashmir valley undue advantage.
The other issue that is likely to cause friction is the formation of regional councils in Jammu and Ladakh that deserve greater autonomy than is given to them at present. In this context, all stakeholders must start worrying that the elections have widened the gulf between the region of Jammu and the dominant Kashmir valley. The BJP won overwhelmingly in Jammu but gained very little in the valley. No wonder, many besides the outgoing Chief Minister, have remarked that the elections were “fought not over any real issue but along religious and regional lines”. In retrospect it seems that the highest turnout of the voters in the valley was aimed at keeping the BJP out.
A brief word about the election in Jharkhand: The BJP’s victory is decisive, but the Congress has been virtually decimated, as in several other states earlier. Even in J&K the Congress tally plummeted below that of the much disliked National Conference. With the loss of Jharkhand, the only two states in North India the Congress still rules are tiny Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, while the BJP is trying to spread to the southern states, too.  The number of the Lok Sabha constituencies where the Congress is in either third or even fourth position has now increased to 329 out of the total 543. The question is whether Congress president Sonia Gandhi, her son and party vice-president Rahul Gandhi and their advisers are bothered about this and are trying to do anything to prevent a further decline of the once grand old party.