Is J&K heading for another coalition regime?

Ehsan Fazili

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, January 16

Unlike previous years, political activities are not frozen in Kashmir this winter as parties have started warming up ahead of the Assembly poll, most probably going to be held along with the general election.

The elections were necessitated following the dissolution of the Assembly after the collapse of the PDP-BJP coalition government last year.

The big question ahead of the Assembly elections remains whether the state will be having a single-party rule or the coalition arrangement will come into force once again after three such terms since 2002. Two national parties, the Congress and BJP and two regional parties, the PDP and NC, had to enter into coalition arrangements in the last three elections — PDP-Congress alliance from 2002 to 2008, NC-Congress from 2009 to 2014 and PDP-BJP from 2014 onwards — which, however, broke away midway. None of the parties has been able to get a majority in the 87-member Assembly in the past three elections. The NC, in 1996, got a clear majority with 57 seats in the first elections after nearly seven years of President’s rule since the eruption of militancy in the early 1990s.

After the coalition’s fall last year, it will be an uphill task for the PDP to regain ground in both Kashmir and Jammu regions, though it is yet to make its way into Ladakh. It seems as a price of the “unholy alliance”, eight former MLAs of the PDP have left the party and joined either the NC or Sajad Lone’s People’s Conference, an ally of the BJP in the last coalition government. Mehbooba Mufti exhumes confidence that her party will get “more seats than in the previous elections”, but has stopped short of saying that it will get a clear majority.

The NC and Congress, which had coalitions in the past, are eying a clear majority in the elections. NC president Farooq Abdullah hoped that his party would “get a majority and we don’t need crutches (coalition) to hold our government together”.

The Congress has said that it would focus on the youth and would provide a “clean government” having an all-inclusive “secular character”.

Last single-party majority in 1996

The big question ahead of the Assembly elections remains whether the state will be having a single-party rule or the coalition arrangement will come into force once again after three such terms since 2002. No party has been able to get a majority in the 87-member Assembly in the past three elections. The NC, in 1996, got a clear majority with 57 seats in the first elections after nearly seven years of President’s rule since the eruption of militancy in the early 1990s.