Congress, NC, PDP, PDF, DPN and coalition’s other associate
members voting for UPA-II candidate
Excelsior Special Correspondent
JAMMU, July 16: The fourteenth Presidential elections in India have brought together strange political bedfellows in Jammu and Kashmir. Absence of the National Conference stalwart, Mohammad Shafi Uri or the ruling coalition’s MLAs from Karnah and Nobra or the associate ally, Charanjit Singh (Independent MLA of Kathua) need not be interpreted as a fissure. All the MLAs and MPs of the National Conference-Congress coalition, including its associate allies, are understood to have communicated to the powers that be that they would be all present in Srinagar on July 18th to vote for the UPA candidate, Pranab Mukherjee, on July 19th.
Even the most wobbling Engineer Sheikh Abdul Rasheed, the Independent MLA from Langet, was conspicuous by his attendance at Mukherjee’s meet-the-voter session at SKICC today. In keeping with his style, Er Rasheed claimed to have handed Mukherjee a resolution, seeking clemency to the Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru. “Since he (the UPA candidate) did not disappoint me with a negative response, I have all the reasons to believe that he, as President, would get Guru off the gallows”, Er Rasheed maintained in his conversations with mediapersons after the SKICC conclave.
Other associate allies, including the Democratic Party (Nationalist) chief, Ghulam Hassan Mir, CPI(M) State Secretary, Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami, and PDF founder, Hakeem Mohammad Yasin, attended the meeting with Mukherjee with transparent enthusiasm. With that, it became unambiguously clear that UPA’s rival would get just a few votes from BJP and Panthers Party (PP). Principal opposition party, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), had already made it clear that it would favour none other than Mukherjee.
Interestingly, in a an identical scenario, then principal opposition party, NC, had given its vote en bloc to then ruling UPA’s Presidential candidate, Pratibha Patel, in 2007. Congress and PDP were the coalition partners of the UPA-I that time.
Like Mrs Patel in 2007, candidate of the UPA-II, Pranab Mukherjee, is the winner by all indications this time. Even in absence of his visit to Srinagar, Mukherjee did not appear to be in a danger zone. Political observers insist that his drumming up support in J&K and several other minimum value States was only aimed at swelling his margin. After his interactive session with the coalition partners at SKICC, Mukherjee drove straight to the PDP Patron Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s residence at Gupkar Road. Party’s entire top brass was eagerly waiting for the extraordinary guest and treated him to a promise of reciprocity. Everybody, sources said, sounded indebted to the PDP’s well-wisher in the UPA.
Oldies like Mukherjee and Makhan Lal Fotedar have been Mufti’s promoters in Congress and the UPA. Having played a key role in making PDP as UPA’s ally and installing Mufti as Chief Minister in Jammu and Kashmir in 2002, Mukherjee did not conceal his magnetism for his friend even in the party’s worst times in 2008. At a time, when Mufti and his secessionist-friendly PDP had become dramatically untouchable for New Delhi due to the terror strikes of 26/11 on Mumbai, Mukherjee stuck his neck out for the estranged Congress partner. “Congress has not shut its doors for PDP and we could together form another Government”, he said, days after the Mumbai strikes, during Assembly election campaigning in Jammu, in December 2008.
Paradoxically, it was Congress in Jammu and PDP in Srinagar that paid the price for Mukherjee’s pro-PDP posture. It was palatable neither to the right wing urban constituency in Jammu-Samba, where BJP got the benefit, nor to the urban electorate in Srinagar. In both, voters in the final leg of the elections perceived some sort of a ‘Congress-PDP-Jamaat axis’ in Mukherjee’s off-the-cuff. While BJP swept the seats in Jammu-Samba, losing just one to NC, NC made a clean sweep in Srinagar. Obviously, Mukherjee would have never intended to harm Congress in Jammu and PDP in Srinagar.
If political sources in high echelons of the establishment are to be believed, Mukherjee, alongwith few others in the Congress, was a strong votary of terminating Omar Abdullah’s Government and getting Mufti back as Chief Minister in the summer turmoil of 2010. He, according to sources, was among the senior Congress leaders who raised the pitch of “governance deficit” against the Omar Abdullah Government. It was only when the Congress supremo and the UPA chairperson, Sonia Gandhi, put her foot down that Omar got a decisive lease of life.
However, before heading for Mufti’s house in Srinagar today, Mukherjee left no stone unturned to recollect his longtime association with Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. He narrated to his audiences—Farooq Abdullah and Omar Abdullah included—at SKICC how intimately he had worked with the NC founder (“when I was the Finance Minister and he was the Chief Minister”) in 1975. The results in J&K are a forgone conclusion.
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