11th April, 2019, the polling day in Baramullah andJammu-Poonch constituency during the recently concluded Lok-Sabha elections,dawned as another normal bright sunny day. The difference though was that thetown was relatively calmer after many days of deafening campaign by thecacophonous loudspeakers which strolled across the town area on mini-vans.Poonch, a borderland district with 6-7% Hindu population mostly situated in thetown area, had been an amusing area to observe for election-onlookers all thiswhile ever since the campaigning had gathered pace. Since the district fallsunder Jammu constituency, the campaign machinery of the Bhartiya Janta partyhad been overtly active in the town. The district is divided into four tehsils,with tehsil haveli having around 49 villages. With the rising migratory trends,Hindus and Sikhs have largely shifted from these villages to the town-area,hence providing a firm ‘base’ in the town, something that the BJP has beenseeking in the peripheral regions outside Jammu. The result is such that in thepast few years, BJP has managed to come up with one of its kinddistrict-party-office, hinting at its ambitions and the very many proliferatingbranches in this border district. One of my respondents at the promise ofanonymity added that no main party has managed to build such a big party officein past 70 or so years of elections in the state, the fact that BJP did it in ashort span of 3-4 years shows the ground work they have focussed upon. Hefurther added that the people now recognise their work through the permanentstructures such as the party headquarter in the town that they have constructed.This shows that the district with a sitting BJP-MLC has solid party networkssomething that was difficult to imagine a few years ago.
The improbability of BJP creating such a robust mesh in thetown area was largely based upon the disproportionate population that issegregated unevenly all over the district. The villages largely have Muslimbase, something which the PDP and NC have been catering to successfully sinceages. On the polling day, at one of the polling stations within the town, Iobserved that even in the early morning the station had BJP workers, commonlyknown as agents. Agents are those who overlook the polling process on thebehalf of the party and keep a check on malpractices like rigging, proxy etcand also facilitate party’s agenda on the D-day. However, the amusement thatmorning was that the station only had BJP workers duly assigned by the party,and the first thing one could have observe was ‘where are the agents from otherparties, and why have they chosen to be absent knowing well that BJP has doneits homework well and have assigned workers appropriately at many stations inthe town?’. On enquiring later in the day, I came to know that the Congress-NCcoalition and the PDP usually focus on the peripheral village level polling stationsin the district where they are confident that the BJP cannot intrude in theirvoter-bases. So even if BJP focuses upon all the polling stations in the town,a larger voter base that is situated in the villages of district Poonch shallbe devoid of such a hefty presence of polling-agents from BJP.
Speaking of the villages, another respondent from Saloonia,in village Sathra, a village with a mix of Gujjar and Pahari-Kashmiripopulation added that the polling day didn’t end without a giant fiasco wherearguments turned into something that has been unheard of. He claimed that aftera certain period, the villagers began doubting the EVMs and according to hisstory, some of them entered into altercation with the booth-officers resultingin confiscation of EVM by the villagers. Looking for more details in order tocorroborate his claims I asked if the villagers filed a complaint with theelection-authorities, to which he had no answer. But the enthusiasm and zealwith which him and his village-mates were narrating the incident showed how theEVMs scam as raised by the main opposition parties at the centre did have itsreverberations in one of the remotest villagers in the borderland district ofthe conflict ridden state as well.
The BJP was credited with its solid ground work when theywon Tripura after 25 or so years of incumbent left-front in 2018. The theoriesthat have been floating since then about their sturdy ground-work and the waythey have been penetrating into untouched corners of the country through theirworkforce were in fact evident when they put up a strong show in this bordertown of Poonch knowing well that a strong worker-network within the town wouldhardly help them when the larger proportion of voters based in villages wouldnot have voted for them. This in my opinion is a equally and challenge and awakeup call to other parties who chose to remain less active in thetown-polling-stations in the on-going elections. Continuously ignoring suchsigns can prove disastrous to them as well as to regions such as these that arealready gasping for a breath of normalcy. Pockets like a borderland have thecapacity to turn-tables through their voter base. The flip side of the entirestory is that with their growing work-force and strong ground-work, what is atstake is also the polarisation between Muslims and non-Muslims, which otherwiseare crucial for the communal harmony of an already war torn borderland such asPoonch which faces incessant cease-fire violations on an everyday bases. Thiselection season, the quick observation that has shone light on BJP and itsworkforce with their prominent election activity has been manifest to theextent that driving from Rajouri to Poonch the entire pathway is covered withBJP flags. This shows the inputs the right-wing has managed to put inespecially in a border-district where the only voters they can get are the 5-6%non-Muslims situated primarily in the town centre. Important lesson to takeaway from this season is for the rest of the parties like NC, PDP, Congress etcis that if they want to bridge this communal divide in the state and strive forharmony in these difficult times, they need to counter BJP with an equallystrong ground-work that can connect them specifically with the Hindu-Sikh voterin such pockets of the state, because it is these non-Muslim strata that theBJP has been focussing upon and if sold it will be a disaster for theborderland of Poonch and for other regions of the same kind. Borderconstituencies have a ton other issues that need to be addressed immediately.If caught up in this hindu-muslim divide, the borderlands might end up losingtheir minority population at the hands of political activities that strikeright at the communal divide. I hope Congress, National Conference, People’sDemocratic Party, People’s Conference and the new entrants like the Jammu andKashmir People’s Movement are paying attention.
(Malvika Sharma is PhD scholar at Jawarlal Nehru University,New Delhi)