The price of a BJP alliance: How the PDP lost Kashmir

One August afternoon earlier this year, Aijaz Ahmad Mir, a young politician and former MLA of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), was busy campaigning in his constituency of Zainapora (formerly Wachi) in South Kashmir when he learned that the party leadership had decided not to give him a ticket to contest in the Assembly election.

Mir had won the previous Assembly election with 15,610 votes, defeating Showkat Hussain Ganie of the National Conference (NC) by around 1,700 votes. “I was shocked,” said Mir, adding “not because I was denied the mandate but because I wasn’t even consulted before the decision.”

The party had decided to field Ghulam Mohiuddin Wani, a former personal assistant of PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti. “I was with the party when everyone left, and this is the price I paid,” Mir said. A miffed Mir fought the election as an independent candidate. Although he lost to a National Conference candidate, he successfully prevented the PDP candidate from winning.

Mir, 38, was not the only leader to resign from the party after such “humiliation”. Over nine leaders and potential candidates left the PDP after being denied tickets. And it was not the first wave of desertions either, it was the third time a group of leaders were quitting the party. As a result, the PDP suffered a huge blow and could win only three seats of the roughly 80 seats it contested (the Assembly has 114 seats). Two of these wins were from South Kashmir’s Tral and Pulwama and one was from North Kashmir’s Kupwara district.

All the leaders who quit, like Mir, shared the same grievance: they were not consulted before the decision. “The party is in absolute shambles after the death of Mufti sahib (Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, founder of PDP),” said one of the leaders who had resigned after he was not given a ticket.

The rise of the PDP

The Jammu and Kashmir People’s Democratic Party was founded in 1999 by the former Union Home Minister, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed. It came to power in the October 2002 Assembly election, forming a coalition government with the Congress, under a rotational chief ministership of three years each. Mufti Mohammed Sayeed was Chief Minister (CM) until November 2006, after which Ghulam Nabi Azad of the Congress took over. But the coalition collapsed in 2008 when the PDP withdrew in protest over the land allotment made to the Amarnath Shrine Board.

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It was widely believed at the time that the PDP was formed with the “blessing” of New Delhi, as the Centre wanted to end the dominance of the National Conference, which had been a political force in Jammu and Kashmir since its merging with India. In 1999, the National Conference passed an autonomy resolution with a strong majority in the State legislative Assembly, but the Centre ultimately rejected it.

“New Delhi felt threatened and felt it was important to create an alternative regional party in J&K,” said a political analyst based in Kashmir.

A former chief of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) told Frontline that although there was no need to create a new regional political party, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed wanted to become CM and saw an opportunity now. “While he was in the Congress, he would not have become CM, so he created a regional party, perhaps with the help of New Delhi,” said the former RAW Chief, requesting not to be named. “I had a conversation with Mufti sahib those days and he said that it was very important to create an alternative regional party in Jammu and Kashmir.”

The PDP thrived on the politics of “soft separatism”—stressing dialogue with Pakistan and separatists. The PDP was also alleged to have covertly received support from the Jamaat-e-Islami, now banned, during elections—a charge both the parties deny.

The PDP claimed to have rescued people from Army camps where they had been forced into labour, disbanded the government militia (locally known as Ikhwan), created the Special Task Force of Jammu and Kashmir Police, and repealed the controversial Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA).

It was during Mufti’s tenure that the first passenger bus crossed the Line of Control (LoC) through the peace bridge, Aman Sethu, bringing a new thaw in bilateral relations between India and Pakistan. For the first time, Kashmiris could cross the border without a visa or passport and there was a spurt in cross-LoC trade. But both came to a halt in 2019 after India accused Pakistan of sponsoring militancy in the Valley. Mufti advocated a “Healing Touch” policy to repair ties with the people.

Over the years, the PDP created a strong base in their hometown of South Kashmir, especially in the Srigufwara-Bijbehara Assembly constituency in Anantnag district. They also made significant in-roads in other parts of Jammu and Kashmir. Party workers led by former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti built the party “brick by brick”.

In 2010, when Kashmir was shaken by massive street protests following the killing of three civilians in an alleged fake encounter, resulting in over 120 casualties, the National Conference (NC), then in power, faced a severe backlash for its mishandling of the situation.

In 2014, when the Assembly election came, PDP seized the opportunity and emerged as the single largest party in Kashmir with 28 seats. However, in the Hindu-majority Jammu region, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept up almost all the seats with 25 wins.

The PDP, under Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s leadership and after many negotiations, allied with the BJP, calling it a “meeting of the north and south Poles”. Little did Mufti know that this alliance would ultimately turn his party upside down. In January 2016, Sayeed died after a brief illness, leaving his daughter, Mehbooba Mufti, to inherit both the leadership of the party and the complex alliance. For over three months, Mehbooba Mufti did not take oath as Chief Minister.

The fall

Mehboob’s former party leaders told Frontline that while Senior Mufti had chosen to align with the BJP with “conviction” his daughter was not comfortable with the saffron party. “She wasn’t comfortable with an alliance with the BJP,” recalled Haseeb Drabu, who was Finance Minister in the PDP-BJP government and played an important role in stitching the alliance. Drabu added: “In fact, none of the legislators from the PDP were in favour but Mufti sahib decided to go with the alliance and I, along with other people, were asked to execute it.”

According to Drabu, Mehbooba stepped into the “very big shoes” of her father but struggled to run the government effectively. “She built the party brick by brick but the fact remains she could not manage the alliance,” he said.

In a column, Drabu wrote: “The reasons for her failure as a Chief Minister are the same as that for her success as a politician. She ran the government as if she was running a political party. By far her biggest failure was in not being able to make the transition from an agitationist to an administrator.”

Political observers believe that the PDP was “punished” for aligning with the BJP in this Assembly election, which was held after a decade. The alliance made it possible for the right-wing BJP to rule the Muslim-majority region for the first time. It is widely believed that it was the PDP-BJP alliance that eventually paved the way for the abrogation of Article 370.

In 2016, the Kashmir Valley erupted in deadly protests following the killing of Burhan Wani, the poster figure of the region’s new-age militancy. Violent clashes between young people and security forces led to the deaths of over 120 people, while hundreds were left blinded by pellet guns. The region remained in lockdown for more than six months.

At a press conference in Srinagar, alongside the then Home Minister Rajnath Singh, who was in the Valley to assess the situation, Mehbooba Mufti controversially defended the actions of the security forces, remarking that those killed in the violence “had not gone out to buy milk and toffee”. “Those remarks continue to haunt her, and the people haven’t forgiven her,” said a party leader.

Two years after the Wani killing, in 2018, claiming ideological differences between the “north pole” and “south pole”, the alliance fell apart, but only because the BJP pulled out of the alliance to pave the way for Governor’s rule in the State.

Since 2018, over 40 MLAs have left the party along with thousands of their supporters. When former Minister Altaf Bukhari was expelled from the PDP in 2019, he went on to launch his own party, Jammu and Kashmir Apni Party (JKAP) in 2020, which was then joined by many leaders. One former PDP senior said: “These were not just leaders but a huge chunk of the voters too who went with JKAP.”

From the 28 seats it had in the last Assembly election, the PDP secured just three seats in 2024, a dramatic fall. All three candidates nominated for the Parliamentary election in May this year, including party chief Mehbooba Mufti, lost their seats.

The PDP’s vote share has dropped significantly, from 22.67 per cent in the 2014 Assembly election to just 8.8 per cent in 2024. In its bastion of south Kashmir, the party could only win two of 16 seats. In previous elections, it had won 11 seats from here. The top leaders who lost the elections from south Kashmir include Mehbooba Mufti’s daughter Iltija Mufti, Mufti’s uncle Sartaj Madni Abdul Rehman Veeri, and Mehboob Beig.

This was the party’s poorest performance since its inception. In its first election in 2002, it secured 16 seats, followed by 21 seats in 2008. The party’s peak came in 2014 when it won 28 seats.

When Mehbooba Mufti chose not to contest the election this year, observers said that it was because it was already clear that the party had been critically weakened by its association with the BJP and she realised that a humiliating defeat was likely.

“This [the loss] is essentially a backlash against the PDP’s 2014 alliance with the BJP,” said Ajai Sahni, founding member and executive director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management and South Asia Terrorism Portal, and argued that Mehbooba’s assertion that she would not like to be part of an Assembly that “resembles a municipality” was essentially a face-saving device. “The writing was already on the wall in the party’s performance in the preceding general election, and this is what led to the exodus of leaders, further weakening the party.”

From the beginning, elections in the Valley have often resulted in fragmented mandates and coalition governments. However, in the absence of a strong opposition this time, the National Conference regained prominence as voters once again rallied behind the party. “Since the PDP, despite promising otherwise, allied with the BJP in the past, it could not be trusted. So, the people rallied behind the NC beyond even the party’s own expectations,” said Praveen Donthi, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, a think tank based in New Delhi.

Former PDP leaders, however, view the party’s decline as more than just a fallout of its alliance with the BJP; they point to favouritism, trust deficit, and prioritising figures from the Mufti dynasty as key reasons for its poor performance in the election.

Notably, the party chose Iltija Mufti, daughter of Mehbooba Mufti to contest from the Srigufwara-Bijbehara constituency replacing four-time MLA Abdul Rehman Veeray, who represented the constituency from 1999 to 2018. He was asked to contest from Anantnag East where he lost by 14,000 votes to NC’s candidate. The party faced severe criticism for choosing Iltija over a senior leader. Soon after taking oath as Chief Minister, Mehbooba inducted her brother Tasaduq Hussain Mufti into the cabinet, raising eyebrows in the party.

PDP sources told Frontline that Mehbooba sensed that New Delhi might be trying to divide her party, which led to a growing trust deficit within her inner circle. Equally, with the death of Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, Mehbooba seemed to have lost confidence and was unable to run the government.

“The problem started with the demise of Mufti. Some people close to him were sidelined, and they ultimately left,” said a former PDP leader. He also spoke of significant differences between Mehbooba’s paternal and maternal families.

The BJP knew what was going on inside the party. “That’s why it was easy for them to break it,” he said.

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Former Minister and senior PDP leader Naeem Akhtar, however, had a different view. He told Frontline that the party was the main target of the BJP after the abrogation of Article 370, and it collapsed because it did not do the “dirty work” the BJP wanted it to do. “The BJP wanted us to crack down on those who they perceived as their enemies, but we didn’t allow that to happen,” he said, adding “Even though we were in a coalition, we played the role of opposition to the BJP and the main roadblock in their plans. And this is the price the PDP had to pay for standing by its vision during the alliance.”

After the alliance broke, the PDP also faced heat from the Central government, with a couple of its leaders arrested and questioned by Central investigative agencies such as the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED).

Political observers believe that the PDP need not be written off and that it can bounce back depending on the situation. “The PDP’s prospects will be defined by a variety of factors, overwhelmingly external to the party’s own actions,” said Sahni, adding, “If, for any reason, public anger swells against the NC and Congress, there will be an opportunity for the PDP to step into the resulting power vacuum.”

Another point to note, as Sahni said, is that if PDP’s ambitions coalesce with New Delhi’s calculations, it may well receive “covert assistance from the agencies that contributed to its initial rise”.

Donthi too believes that the PDP can make a comeback if it “reinvents” itself and negotiates this phase. “Much will depend on New Delhi’s calculations, whether it would like to give some breathing space or not. Since the BJP government’s attempts at creating other political parties for this Assembly election were nipped in the bud, it would probably want to have the presence of the PDP, however weak, to keep the NC in check.

“We haven’t gone anywhere. We are here and will bounce back,” said Akhtar.

Auqib Javeed is an independent journalist based in Jammu and Kashmir. He reports on human rights, politics, and the environment.