Less than a month after the defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly elections, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leader Ram Madhav raised a question about the mandate.

The National Conference government, Madhav told The Indian Express, was not “representative” of the entire Union territory because “the Jammu heartland was missing from it”.

In these first elections held in Jammu and Kashmir since August 2019, when New Delhi unilaterally abrogated the special provisions provided to Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Constitution, the National Conference secured a majority in the Union Territory, sweeping the Valley, while the BJP won the majority of the seats in Jammu province.

The BJP was unable to form a government on its own or with a coalition despite redrawing assembly constituencies by creating six additional constituencies in Jammu and only one in Kashmir, fielding proxy candidates in the Valley and empowering the lieutenant governor to nominate five representatives to the assembly.

Granting Scheduled Caste status to the Pahari community and Other Backward Classes status to some other communities also failed to translate into electoral gains. They failed to give the only Muslim-majority region a Hindu chief minister.

For the party, the Jammu results were indeed a silver lining. Ninety seats went to the polls in the Union territory. Of the 43 seats in the Jammu division, the BJP emerged as the single-largest party, winning 29. But the claim that the BJP’s majority in Jammu province means that the entire region rallied behind it or that the resultant Assembly is unrepresentative of the Jammu province does not hold.

Such a narrative homogenises an inherently heterogenous region, erasing diversities that are reflected in voting behavior and patterns.

Regional and subregional heterogeneity

Jammu and Kashmir does not consist solely of the two regions of Jammu and Kashmir. Within these regions, there are subregions with unique geographical, cultural, and historical characteristics. The heterogeneity within Jammu is more apparent than in Kashmir. Jammu’s construction as a political monolith goes back to the Treaty of Amritsar in 1846, which clubbed together (or annexed) regions with diverse cultures and histories.

To the present day, this influences the politics of regionalism and sub-regionalism, which is often couched in regional and sub-regional claims, competing demands, movements, counter-movements and varied ideologies.

While Muslims are a minority in the Jammu region, they constitute the majority in the subregions of Pir Panjal and Chenab Valley. In a polarised political climate, Muslims in Jammu region do not subscribe to the BJP’s Hindutva rhetoric or support the divisive aspirations of a separate Jammu state. Hence, neither the Hindus nor the Muslims form a distinct or unified political bloc.

These areas and their populations cannot be included in the overarching definition of Jammu that BJP propagates.

Pertinently, the city of Jammu was the second base (after Nagpur) of the RSS, the parent of the BJP and a family of other Hindutva organisations. The RSS’s dominance in contemporary Indian politics allows it to project Jammu as a BJP bastion. The urban Hindutva leadership has always superimposed its narrative onto the entire Jammu province, as if to claim that Jammuties have one voice, one opinion and one language of politics.

These are hollow claims as the recent elections demonstrated. Jammu’s subregions voted heavily in favour of the National Conference which, surprisingly, outperformed the Congress.

From a historical perspective, the political leadership based in Jammu city, dating back to the times of the Praja Parishad founded by RSS activist Balraj Madhok, consistently called for the removal of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status and a complete integration with India.

When Sheikh Abdullah became the head of the interim government in 1948, Praja Parishad launched an agitation demanding the abrogation of Article 370 and Jammu and Kashmir’s merger with India. As a last resort, if their first demand could not be fulfilled, they pushed for Jammu to be merged into the Indian Union.

After Sheikh was ousted and imprisoned in 1953, his colleague Mirza Afzal Baig launched the Plebiscite Front, advocating for a referendum as the final solution to the Kashmir dispute. While the Praja Parishad’s calls for merger were prominent in the Dogri-speaking belt of Jammu, plebiscite politics gained traction in the Pir Panjal and Chenab valley.

Secessionism ossified in the Kashmir Valley as communalism spread in Jammu province which targeted Muslims of the whole Jammu region. Thus, as Balraj Puri notes, communalism/ultranationalism and secessionism in Jammu and Kashmir respectively fueled each other.

Myth of regional dominance

Due to the general backwardness of the two subregions of the Pir Panjal and Chenab valley, compounded by poor health and educational facilities, many people – both Hindu and Muslim – have no option but to migrate to Jammu. But this migration has been perceived by Dogras in Jammu’s urban areas as a cultural and demographic threat. They even claim that it represents an effort to Islamise Jammu.

This is the reason organisations like IkkJutt Jammu, spearheaded by Ankur Sharma, the defence lawyer in the Kathua rape and murder case, gained popularity in Jammu city and its surrounding districts.

The case pertains to the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl from the Bakerwal nomadic community who was kidnapped from Kathua’s Rasana area on January 10 in 2018 and found dead on January 17. According to the 15-page chargesheet in the case, she was kidnapped, drugged, hit by a stone, raped and strangulated inside the premises of a temple.

After several accused were arrested, the Hindu Ekta Manch organised protest marches. Sharma claimed that the Hindu men arrested in the case had been falsely implicated.

In the context of the resentment against migrants to Jammu city, it is seen how the Kathua case was politicised and why people of “Duggar Desh” or the Dogri-speaking belt came out to support the accused.

Politician Choudhary Lal Singh, who had also sworn solidarity with the accused in the Kathua rape and murder case, launched his own organisation, the Dogra Swabhiman Sangathan, espousing statehood for Jammu region. The Jammu State Morcha had similar demands.

All these organisations were gradually absorbed by political parties, mainly the BJP, as they failed to garner support despite representing the Jammu or Dogra cause. The BJP and these organisations believe that a separate Jammu state would return to its people the “Dogra pride” that they perceive to have been snatched from them by Kashmiri leadership. They believe this would end the Kashmiri dominance over Jammu and create new development opportunities for the region.

However, claims of Kashmir’s dominance, of it receiving more funds than Jammu or undermining Jammu’s pride lack a factual basis. These are largely rhetorical statements that have long been used to construct misleading narratives and sway public opinion in Jammu for political purposes.

The Jammu and Kashmir State Finance Commission, in its 2010 report, showed that the Jammu region outperformed Kashmir on seven out of ten indicators. In the other three, Kashmir was only marginally ahead.

According to the report, from the Eighth Five-Year Plan (1992-’97) through the Tenth Five-Year Plan (2002-’07), the Jammu region received 42.7% of the total district plan expenditure, while the Kashmir region’s share stood at 43.5%. Data compiled by the commission covering 1977-’78 to 2006-’07 also shows that district plan expenditure has generally remained balanced, with a few years showing higher expenditure for Jammu district.

The State Finance Commission report states that, given the state’s diversity, neither state-sector nor district-sector funds appear to be unequally allocated between Jammu and Kashmir regions to an extent that would suggest significant disparity or discrimination. Thus, claims of discrimination in development between the regions are not valid.

If at all, the report suggests that the subregions of Pir Panjal and Chenab valley underperform compared to the Jammu and some adjoining districts. It would appear that the “Jammu Centre” that is at the forefront of promulgating the myth of Kashmir region’s overall dominance is itself marginalising the “Jammu periphery” insofar as socio-economic development is concerned.

Between myth and fact

The BJP in Jammu and Kashmir has consistently relied on communal and regional polarisation for electoral benefit. The party attempted various political, demographic, and electoral strategies to secure victory.. With no way to explain its decisive loss in the elections, the resultant Assembly has been declared unrepresentative of the entire Jammu province – a claim replicated by leading commentators and analysts.

If Jammu is viewed as a homogenous region that “voted en masse for the BJP”, then the questions about democratic representation gain some credibility. However, if Jammu is seen as heterogeneous, composed of diverse subregions that voted for the BJP, the National Conference, the Congress, the AAP, and even independent candidates, then such questions do not hold.

The subregions voted for the candidates and the political party as they deemed fit, and got representatives who were not from BJP and who are currently in key cabinet positions. This is the culmination of the democratic electoral procedure, which has to be accepted with all the failings of a first past the post system.

Nonetheless, to mitigate the effects of the electoral loss, the calls for separate statehood for the Jammu region have been reignited. There is a new lease of life for the sentiment that the odds will continue to be stacked against the Jammu region as long as it remains politically linked with Kashmir. Commentators who believe in democratic frameworks seemingly buy into this argument and clothe it in concerns of underrepresentation. This is misplaced.

It is time to read the writing on the wall of the entire region and not just of the Jammu city.

The author is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Political Science, University of Kashmir, with research focus on marginality, marginalisation and minority rights. His email address is touqeerplssc@gmail.com.