The ministry of small mercies

CHENNAI: The more important of the two electoral verdicts we received on Tuesday is the one from Jammu & Kashmir, although it’s the other, the surprise victory of the BJP in Haryana, that is likely to get the headlines. Perhaps unreasonably in hindsight, the Congress was tipped to win a handsome majority in the state and manage, in partnership with the National Conference, a hung verdict in the Union Territory, but voters have given it a drubbing in one and a mandate in the other. Proof yet again that exit polls are no more than prime time fodder for a day.

It's understandable why we are more intrigued by the Haryana results than the Kashmir verdict, despite the latter being a border territory and the theatre of a longstanding insurgency. Having been cut to size in the Lok Sabha elections three months ago, the Narendra Modi coalition regime was expected to be put to a severe test in state elections in the months following, and Haryana was the first of it. Courtesy its formidable talent for the dark arts of election management, the BJP has won the day, and will look to reprise the performance in Maharashtra and Jharkhand in the weeks to come.

However, success in one state is no guarantee of success in another. Just as the Congress has learnt that the advances it made in the Lok Sabha elections may not automatically lead to victory in state elections, the BJP will find that Maharashtra is another time another place. In Haryana, it succeeded in blunting the Congress’ misguided policy of wooing the Jats to the exclusion of everyone else, by courting everyone else to stymie the Jats.

In Maharashtra, the Congress is not likely to repeat the mistake it made in Haryana, of having blind faith in the Bhupinder Hooda strongman myth. For one thing it has no strongman there to lull it into complacency, and its allies there, the Shiv Sena and the NCP, are as well-schooled as the BJP in the art of building counter-coalitions. So, Maharashtra remains a formidable challenge for the BJP despite the Haryana success.

The verdict in Jammu & Kashmir holds a different kind of significance for the winner of the election. This was the first election there since 2014, and the first since Article 370 was nullified in 2019 and the territory was reduced to Union Territory status. Given that such summary actions produced no respite from bloodshed in the past five years, the miracle of these elections is that they were even held and that 63.88 per cent of the voters actually turned up to vote.

The challenges for the incoming government will be immense. The newly elected Assembly will operate under a different legal framework compared to its predecessors. The Jammu & Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019, grants the Lieutenant Governor substantial powers over legislative matters, greatly limiting the Assembly's authority.

Then there is the immediate issue of nominated MLAs. While the NC-Congress alliance does have a comfortable majority, Lt. Gov Manoj Sinha can greatly alter the situation by nominating five members of his choice to the Assembly, changing the majority mark to 48 and leaving the ruling alliance with a thin margin.

Knowing how the BJP-led government has railroaded the duly elected government of Delhi, few will expect the government to deliver on its main promise of restoring statehood to J&K, and exercising control over the territory’s police. For now, it’s best to be grateful for small mercies.