R Jagannathan

Firstpost.com

The tension seen in the freshly-minted Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) alliance between the PDP and the BJP is actually par for the course. To expect two sides with completely different voter bases to immediately settle into a cosy marriage of convenience would have been to expect too much. Both sides have their core constituencies to reassure – Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in his Muslim base in Kashmir Valley and the BJP in Hindu-majority Jammu - and this will invariably cause heartburn.

The stakes for the BJP are higher than the PDP because if J&K works, the same formula can be rolled out on a national scale with other minority-based parties. Assam and Kerala are obvious candidates for such communal identity-based alliance experiments. In both states, there are sizeable Muslim populations that will not vote BJP easily.

Two controversial statements have been made by the PDP – one by the Mufti himself, who thanked Pakistan for the smooth conduct of the elections – and another by a group of PDP MLAs, who demanded the return of Afzal Guru’s mortal remains, interred in Tihar jail by the UPA after it hanged him.

While the Mufti’s statement was rejected by Home Minister Rajnath Singh in Parliament under pressure from a belligerent Opposition, the demand for the return of Afzal Guru’s remains has similarly been opposed by BJP politicians.

The truth is, both statements have some basis in reality. It is true that Pakistan-based jihadis did not (or could not) attempt to disrupt the assembly elections. While it is fair to credit the Election Commission and the voters, the fact is both Pakistan and the Hurriyat had good reason not to disrupt the elections: with the BJP announcing Mission 44, any large scale boycott by the separatists or jihadi violence from across the border would have thinned out the turnout and given the BJP (and its allies) a possible victory. Both the separatists and Pakistan behaved to keep the BJP out, and Mufti was acknowledging

this. In a sense, the BJP’s rise under Modi indirectly prompted Pakistan to avoid disruption for its own reasons.

As for Afzal Guru, the UPA government did a cowardly thing by not informing the family about his hanging in time, but his burial inside the jail was probably necessitated by the need to prevent his tomb from becoming some kind of rallying point for anti-India forces. The BJP should merely ignore the PDP MLAs’ demands for the handover of his remains, instead of reacting to them. The body has to remain buried inside Tihar for the same reason why Germany does not allow a Hitler cult to grow by allowing symbols associated with the great dictator to be publicly venerated.

Mufti’s party may need to periodically make some such controversial remarks to keep the faith with its constituency, which is jittery over the BJP alliance. Also, let us not forget the obvious reality: it wouldn’t take much for Pakistan to restart its jihadi activities again or bump off politicians joining the J&K government. The father of Sajjad Lone, who will be part of the J&K ministry, was assassinated by pro-Pakistani terrorists some years ago. The father of the Mirwaiz, Maulvi Umar Farooq, was similarly assassinated by terrorists in 1990.

In short, the PDP may be making controversial statements purely out of a sense of self-preservation. This means the BJP will indeed have a tough time defending itself with its core constituency in Jammu, and against the national opposition in parliament.

On the other hand, the National Conference and the Congress – routed in December – will have every reason to exploit every pressure point to upset the PDP-BJP alliance.

The big question is: can such an alliance of north pole and south pole – to use the Mufti’s felicitous description of the two parties – ever work?

Actually, there is sound logic to the alliance that goes beyond J&K itself. Quite apart from the fact that PDP got a mandate from Kashmir and BJP from Jammu, which makes working together the only logical outcome, there is a larger reason why it makes sense for the BJP to attempt this tieup: to overcome its image as a Hindu party.

The problem for the BJP is that it cannot transcend its Hindu image without formally abandoning its Sangh ties. But it cannot abandon its Sangh ties without losing all claim to being a distinctly different party. It is the Sangh links that make the BJP different from the Congress or other regional outfits, and this differentiation is not unimportant in India. Just as the Christian right is important to the US Republican party, the Sangh link is important to the BJP.

This leaves the BJP with a dilemma: if it has to live with a Hindu tag, its ability to attract minority votes will be limited despite its official promise of “sabka saath, sabka vikas”.

This is where it makes sense to formally tie up with a Muslim party. The alliance with the PDP in Jammu & Kashmir is one way for the BJP to retain its Hindu identity without being seen as anti-minority. For the PDP, too, it must be obvious that it does not have the confidence of the Hindu minority in J&K, not to speak of the Buddhist minority in Ladakh.

Are there precedents for such north-pole-south-pole alliances? Yes, there are.

In Kerala, for example, the Congress-led UDF alliance is largely an alliance of parties based on religion or caste. While the Congress claims to be secular, its biggest alliance partner is the Indian Union Muslim League, and the smaller partners include the Christian Kerala Congress. Then there are caste parties.

A similar experiment has succeeded very well in Malaysia, where the ruling UMNO is a Muslim Malay party. It does not represent the Chinese and Indians in Malaysia’s multi-ethnic reality. These communities are represented by their own parties. UMNO thus has a long-term alliance with the Chinese and Indian parties and has run a viable coalition for decades.

The Malaysian and Kerala coalitions have endured because the leaders of all parties have settled down to a formal system of power sharing that guarantees every party its own space.

This is what the BJP and PDP need to achieve. It can only happen if leaders at the top of the BJP, perhaps at the level of Amit Shah if not Narendra Modi, keep talking to the PDP both to smoothen out the rough edges and to sort out differences without making media headlines on a regular basis.

The key thing is to keep a cool head and build trust till the alliance is seen as viable.

The writer is editor-in-chief, digital and publishing, Network18 Group