As BJP makes its moves, can Rahul save the INDIA bloc in Kashmir?

THE PEOPLE’S Democratic Party (PDP) is hoping for Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s intervention to end the standoff with the National Conference (NC) over seat-sharing in Kashmir, which is threatening to unravel the INDIA bloc in the Union territory.

The Gandhi family has close personal relations with the Abdullahs, and the PDP is banking on Rahul being able to persuade them to drop the NC’s insistence on contesting all the three seats in Kashmir, leaving none for the PDP.

Sources said that Congress general secretary Mukul Wasnik has requested the NC and PDP leaders to wait for a meeting with Rahul in Delhi, before taking any step. On Tuesday, Rahul entered Maharashtra, in the final leg of his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra.

The NC has laid claim to the Kashmir seats – Srinagar, Baramulla and Anantnag – on the grounds that it won all three in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. “If the NC wins (these seats) again, it will win them for the INDIA bloc. So what is the problem?” NC president Farooq Abdullah told mediapersons last week.

The sitting MPs of the Kashmir seats currently are Farooq Abdullah, Srinagar; Hasnain Masoodi, Anantnag; and Mohammad Akbar Lone, Baramulla. While Abdullah had won against the PDP’s Aga Syed Mohsin by a little over 70,000 votes in 2019, Masoodi (a retired high court judge) had defeated PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti by 9,656 votes, and Lone had won against the J&K Peoples Conference candidate by over 30,000 votes.

The PDP was relegated to third place in both Anantnag and Baramulla, with the NC pointing out that Mehbooba herself got fewer votes than the Congress’s Ghulam Ahmad Mir.

The PDP believes the 2019 results should not be the right marker for the respective strengths of the parties, as the elections had come a year