Yawar Hussain
Srinagar: Less than a thousand days after Mufti Sayeed, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) founder, died on January 7, 2016, Imran Reza Ansari—a former PDP man—accused Mufti’s daughter Mehbooba Mufti of turning the party into a “family fiefdom.”
Ansari’s July 2, 2018, allegations triggered a tsunami of resignations over the years, leading to the 25-year-old party being reduced to just three seats in the 2024 Assembly Polls.
The worst drubbing for the party came on the Srigufwara – Bijbehara seat, a Mufti family bastion, where Mehbooba’s daughter, Ijtija Mufti, lost her maiden election to the National Conference (NC) by 9770 votes.
Iltija’s defeat was preceded by Mehbooba Mufti’s twin defeats in the 2019 and 2024 parliament elections from south Kashmir. Like Mehbooba, her party’s candidates on the other two Valley seats also lost the consecutive parliament polls.
The PDP’s continuous nosediving prospects, as a regional alternative, ever since the fall of its alliance government with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in June 2018, is being attributed, by incumbent and former leaders, to a gamut of issues including Mehbooba Mufti’s leadership under which alleged nepotism, corruption and a superficial party structure have flourished.
Political observers opine that the repeated justification of alliance with right-wing BJP along with the killings and maiming of civilian people during the Kashmir unrest of 2016 has also cost the party bitterly.
Leadership Woes
Many leaders who left the party, including former legislators and ministers, have drawn parallels between Mufti’s and Mehbooba’s leadership styles with the father being praised while the daughter being termed “whimsical” and “malleable”.
A former party leader from north Kashmir wishing anonymity said the PDP’s struggle to regain its footing in the Valley stems more from internal rather than external factors among which the “whimsical” leadership of Mehbooba has cost the party.
“She gets manipulated easily. She decides one thing in the morning and by the time she discusses with her select few, the earlier collective decision of the party gets changed,” the former party leader said, adding that Mufti Sayeed mostly tended to adopt a consultative approach.
Sources within the party reveal that in the recent assembly polls, the party faced problems with mandate allocation in many constituencies as many aspiring leaders had been promised mandates on one seat by various senior leaders with the blessings of Mehbooba.
A party leader from Srinagar said unlike the NC, the PDP’s senior leaders were themselves in doldrums about their candidature until the polls were announced.
“NC announced constituency in-charges for all 90 seats two years back. We didn’t have leaders in all constituencies but wherever we had good leaders, they were kept in uncertainty. Mehbooba Ji was talking to two or three other aspirants from those areas as well,” the leader said.
“This cost us. Our senior leaders couldn’t concentrate because at least one other contender from their area claimed to have the party mandate. Such a thing would have never happened under Mufti Sahib.”
Also, a group of young party leaders said that after Mufti Sayeed’s death in January 2016, Mehbooba’s delay in forming the government hit her leadership image and exposed her “vulnerabilities” to the BJP.
“A few leaders from PDP were invited by BJP to explore government formation but they were testing waters. When the leaders agreed, it was BJP itself which informed Mehbooba about these leaders,” the group of leaders said, adding that since then Mehbooba tended to trust just a few people which then became the “infamous” coterie.
“Since then, she started to believe that BJP destroyed her party, which was true to an extent, but in other cases, the party’s internal issues got completely ignored.”
A senior Valley-based journalist while comparing Mufti Sayeed with Mehbooba opines that the father-daughter duo were poles apart in their leadership styles.
“Being a Home Minister, he (Sayeed) had very good connections with the higher-ups in the intelligence agencies and people who matter in New Delhi. His intricate understanding of the deep state helped him rule the state better. He was also a very accommodative politician who might not agree with his party colleagues on different issues but wouldn’t hold that grudge against them unlike Mehbooba,” the journalist said.
He said Mehbooba as a politician also elbowed out everyone from her party who did not like her working style.
“Most of the founders of PDP including Tariq Karra, Muzaffar Baig, and others left the party due to her stubbornness.”
Nepotism
With Mehbooba’s leadership style being compared to her father critically, the incumbent and former party leaders allege that the Mufti family’s internal feud has also hurt the party’s prospects.
A senior party leader from south Kashmir, now with the NC, said post-Mufti Sayeed’s death, Mehbooba clipped her paternal side’s wings in the party while empowering the maternal one.
“This was a complete reversal of what Mufti Sayeed followed. During his time, the maternal side of Mehbooba was kept in check. However, she made her maternal uncle Sartaj Madni the party vice president even though he had lost the 2014 polls during a popular wave for the party,” the leader said.
A source within the party revealed that it was Madni who got Mehbooba’s brother, Tassaduq Mufti, an unknown figure in J&K politics till then, into the cabinet to strengthen the maternal side.
“Tassaduq’s entry in 2018 even disgruntled Iltija who was to be inducted into Mehbooba Ji’s chief minister office as an analyst. With Tassaduq in, Madni as vice-president and another maternal uncle Farooq Andrabi as a cabinet member earlier, the party was turned into a family affair,” the source said.
The source added that disgruntled Sajad Mufti, Mehbooba’s paternal cousin, ensured that the votes under his sway went to the NC candidates in the 2024 assembly polls.
Another party leader corroborating the same story said Mehbooba’s paternal side, with few exceptions, became one of the reasons for the party losing Anantnag, Srigufwara-Bijbehara, Anantnag East and Anatnnag – West seats.
The fence-mending of 2018, when Madni and Naeem Akhter were removed from party posts, was, as per sources, an eyewash as the duo along with Waheed-ur-Rehman Parra continued to call the shots.
Tassaduq, who post the fall of the government vanished from the scene, was replaced by Iltija as the family member in this innermost circle of the party, a source revealed.
Similar allegations of a “coterie” surrounding Mehbooba as chief minister were made by Imran Ansari and other leaders post the fall of the alliance government. They had alleged a takeover of the decision-making in the PDP by Sartaj Madni, Naeem Akhter, Tassaduq Mufti and Peer Mansoor.
The party was again faced with a nepotism trial when Mehbooba Mufti thought of introducing her daughter Iltija Mufti in the electoral space.
A senior party leader from central Kashmir said Abdul Rehman Veeri, who had represented Bijbehera four times in the assembly, was asked if he would vacate the seat for Iltija and shift to neighbouring Anantnag-East to which parts of Bijbehara had been added by the delimitation process.
“He (Veeri) never gave a clear answer but what became the last nail in his coffin was he had earlier asked Mehbooba that he would like to see his son contest from Bijbehera and was willing to move to Anantnag-East,” the leader said, adding that Mehbooba asked him to accommodate Iltija as she was like her (Veeri’s) daughter too.
Sources within the party reveal that Veeri never reconciled with the decision and ensured that the PDP scion loses even though the party had a lead of 2500 odd votes in the 2024-parliament polls.
An alleged call recording of Veeri telling his workers to vote for the NC candidate is also dawning on PDP circles. The decision cost PDP both seats.
A former PDP leader from south Kashmir, who quit the party recently, said that the candidature of Mehbooba Mufti and Waheed-ur-Rehman Parra for 2024-parliament polls was tactfully announced within and outside the party in November 2023.
“When these rumours were discussed in the party meetings, the leadership termed them baseless but ultimately the same duo contested almost six months later,” the leader said pointing towards favouritism and how “close-knit” decision-making works in the party.
“We lost both parliament seats badly.”
Two other leaders who left the party in the current election—Pulwama DDC Chairman Syed Bari Andrabi and former PDP State Secretary Rouf Bhat— both alleged “lobbyism” and “nepotism”.
“I resigned because the party is giving the mandates to family members from safer seats,” Andrabi said, while Bhat said the “adoption of parachute entrants from vested lobbies was a replica of mistakes of the past which has got this region to the position it is now in.”
A senior Valley-based journalist says even though Mufti Sayeed introduced Mehbooba to politics, he did not promote nepotism.
“Contrast this to his daughter Mehbooba Mufti’s tenure, and we saw her kitchen cabinet comprising her brother Tassaduq Mufti, her uncles Sartaj Madani and Farooq Andrabi, cousin Sajad Mufti, and close aides Naeem Akhtar and Peerzada Mansoor ruling the roost.”
“When Mehbooba’s cousin’s name came in the recruitment list of the Khadi and Village Industries Board despite him not even having appeared in the recruitment exam, things started going from bad to worse. It is not improving. And when Mehbooba decided to field her daughter Iltija from Bijbehara instead of veteran PDP leader Abdul Rehman Veeri, the writing on the wall was clear for the people as well as for her party,” the journalist added.
He says while Mehbooba would ask the youth to work hard and take the hard route to success, she had reserved the easiest constituency for her own daughter. “It was no wonder that her daughter lost while youngsters like Waheed-ur-Rehman Parra and Fayaz Mir won from the constituencies they contested.”
Favoring Wealthy?
Even though a lot of water has flown down the river Jhelum since 2018, the PDP’s woes, however, have continued to fester.
While the party witnessed over two dozen former legislators, ministers and senior leaders quitting, the current lot is raising allegations of favouring powerful, and resourceful politicians in the mandate distribution on various seats in the Valley.
The first seat of Kokernag assembly surfaced first because of alleged favouring a wealthy leader, where Gujjar activist and former PDP leader Talib Hussain Choudhary accused Mehbooba of deceiving him on mandate for the seat.
Talib alleged that PDP Vice President Abdul Hamid Choudhary had through some of his people declared his candidacy and he (Talib) was asked by Naeem Akhter and a few other leaders to shift to some other constituency.
“Some leaders in PDP had been asking me if I had money to contest the election. I was personally assured by Mehbooba on the mandate but then Abdul Hameed Choudhary, a wealthy man, got in Choudhary Haroon to contest,” Talib said.
In Tral, a foreign returned person had been claiming to have secured the PDP mandate (after alleged financial favours to the party). The claims led to senior party leadership stepping in to douse the flames and getting Rafiq Ahmed Naik to contest at the eleventh hour.
However, post-winning, a congratulatory call on Naik by Naeem Akhter, has also raised questions in the party circles as the former was said to be on his way to the NC post results.
Similar allegations of favours from wealthy politicians for mandates also emerged on the Zainapora seat, where the party’s former MLA and District Development Council (DDC) member Aijaz Ahmad Mir was surprisingly denied the mandate. The mandate went to unknown PDP worker Ghulam Mohuidin Wani, who was pushed to third spot in the final result tally, while Mir, who contested as an independent, was the runner-up.
Mir in an interview said that he trusted Mehbooba with giving him the mandate but still, he was “humiliatingly” ousted.
“Sometime back, the party had asked for donations…………….,” Mir said, while elaborating that the aspiring candidate had not donated as per expectation of the party. Hence, he said that he couldn’t buy the mandate.
In adjoining Shopian, where PDP’s former district vice president and DDC member Raja Waheed left the party after 15 years, the allegations of “lack of respect” and a “consultative” process were levelled against the party leadership.
Raja Waheed questioned the merits behind granting of mandate to Yawar Banday from the seat.
Banday came fifth on the seat even behind the BJP candidate while Waheed was third. PDP’s decision to sideline Raja Waheed, considered a close confidant of Waheed-ur-Rehman Parra, surprised many but sources in the party allege that Banday bought his way in. PDP hadn’t lost the seat since 2002.
In Rajpora, which the PDP had also won since 2002, the party candidate Syed Bashir lost by a whopping 14313 votes. What has left people wondrous is that in the recent parliament elections, the PDP candidate Waheed-ur-Rehman Parra had a lead of 7504 over the NC in Rajpora. PDP leaders in hushed-up tones allege that internal sabotage led to Bashir’s loss as Parra wanted his preferred candidate to contest but had to eat the humble pie.
While Rajpora didn’t come under the financial favouritism allegation umbrella, the mandates doled out by the party in Pahalgam, Trehgam and Beerwah are also alleged to have come under question from the leaders within the PDP.
In Beerwah, former PDP leader Nazir Ahmad Khan had declared to have never left the party indicating that he might return but the party gave the mandate to hitherto unknown Gulam Ahmad Khan who ended up fourth on the seat.
In Trehgam, PDP lost its spokesperson Tahir Sayeed who quit when the mandate on the seat was granted to Mohammad Afzal Wani. Wani stood fifth on the seat.
In Pahalgam, PDP chose Mehbooba’s relative Shabir Ahmed Sediqui who stood third on the seat exactly 18159 votes behind the winner from NC.
Defunct Party Structure
The party has also faced issues on the organisational front. While the NC had an active Vice President in Omar Abdullah, the PDP chose Abdul Rehman Veeri who became conspicuous by his absence from the political scene of the Valley.
During the last two years, while the NC religiously held monthly zone-wise meetings, the PDP rarely met. The party office at Polo View has remained mostly shut with the President, Vice Presidents, General Secretaries and even Spokespersons missing from the scene. In contrast, the NC, Apni Party and the BJP offices have remained active throughout the last two years.
In the run-up to the 2014 assembly polls, when Mufti Sayeed was in-charge, the PDP’s office was one of the robust ones in the region.
A party leader said the leadership had been asked in 2015 to raze down the current building which was affected by the 2014 Kashmir deluge but Naeem Akhter allegedly sabotaged the programme terming the building as a heritage structure.
“He had issues with leaders who had proposed the plan. We also had plans to take on lease around 12 kanals in Kralsangri from the government like NC and BJP have. We wanted to construct a residence for the party president adjacent to the party office. That project met the same fate,” the leader said.
The issue of the party office not being big enough has led to the party’s office bearers not visiting daily leading to ground feedback not reaching the leadership. The current office has just one room for two general secretaries, one room for Vice Presidents and just one room for the whole media team.
Since the fall of the BJP-PDP alliance government, the party leadership had held the majority of their press conferences at Mehbooba’s erstwhile Fairview residence on Gupkar Road while their former chief spokesperson Suhail Bukhari had also taken up office in the same compound.
On the organisational front, PDP’s Abdul Haq Khan, who was a general secretary in 2018, left the party in a hushed-up manner only to return ahead of the assembly polls claiming he had never left.
Party leaders point out that the lack of a clear stand by the party leadership around a senior office bearer like Abdul Haq Khan itself reveals how concerned the leadership is about organisational matters.
The Political Affairs Committee (PAC) of the party had also come under question in September 2018 when former minister Haseeb Drabu, two months before deserting the PDP ship, had cited a breach of the party’s constitutional norms regarding the highest decision-making body.
“PAC in the recent past not only lacked authority but was consciously made to be seen as lacking authority. The constitutional limit on members of the PAC has been breached. In addition to 15 members (as against the stipulated 11), there are 10 invitees taking the number to 28,” Drabu had written in a letter to Mehbooba Mufti.
Six months later in July 2019, Mehbooba dissolved that PAC but the cycle of a “select few” calling the shots has marred the PDP.
Trust Deficit
Political commentators and party leaders opine that one of the major factors behind the party not being able to regain its foothold in the Valley is the ambivalence of the party to take a clear stand on its alliance with the right-wing BJP. In the elections of 2014, the PDP under Mufti Sayeed had sought votes to stop the BJP from coming to power but post the results Sayeed joined hands with the saffron party.
Back then, Sayeed had termed politics as the “art of possibilities” for justifying the alliance of the “north” and “south” poles of the political spectrum in J&K.
Sayeed died less than a year into the government and post him, the party’s rank and file started to justify the alliance.
Political observers state that since June 2018, Mehbooba led from the front to justify the alliance and attribute it to Sayeed’s great vision for J&K.
They say that Kashmiri people, on the other hand, were expecting an apology from the party which never came to date.
This dilemma of whether to apologise or justify the alliance kept the party’s 2014 U-turn alive in the minds of the people, who believed that the party could again join hands with the BJP.
Talking to The Outlook, Noor Ahmad Baba, a Political Science professor at Kashmir University, opines the PDP’s decline in popularity stems from their previous alliance with the BJP, which many people feel “facilitated the BJP’s entry into politics in the state”.
“The mood in the valley has been against BJP and all they have done post-2019 (since the abrogation of article 370)…in their minds people are clear, they don’t want to ‘reward’ BJP for all that has been done. PDP has been losing since 2019, as we saw in the parliamentary elections and this election is reinforcing that.”
Baba says that people remain apprehensive about placing their trust in the PDP, as their past actions “don’t just wash off”.
A senior Valley-based journalist says, unlike Mufti Sayeed, Mehbooba did not understand the importance of Pakistan’s “goodwill” in having peace in Kashmir and joined the bandwagon of the right-wing BJP. “She took the extreme positions that would benefit the BJP in mainland India but damage her own party in Kashmir.”
On the other hand, NC benefitted from the pre-poll alliance with the Congress on the perceptual front if not electoral. People saw NC as the only party which wouldn’t go with the BJP post results because of its alliance with the Congress, a factor openly acknowledged by Chief Minister Omar Abdullah now.
The trust of people in the PDP also continued to wane after the Congress chose NC as an ally for the 2024-parliament polls over PDP even though Mehbooba Mufti shared every dais across the country for the INDIA alliance.
The Congress’s snub, crafted partially by NC, also had PDP’s select few who ensured the party exited the INDIA alliance.
A senior Congress leader wishing anonymity said the party was ready to neither support NC nor PDP on the three parliament seats of the Valley while taking support on two Jammu seats.
The leader revealed that the tables within Congress turned in favour of the NC when the PDP insisted on the candidature of Waheed-ur-Rehman Parra from central Kashmir.
“He is out on bail in a terror-related case. We had a national problem with being associated with the PDP. BJP would have made it a national issue. We had asked Mehbooba Ji to change him (Parra) but she didn’t,” the Congress leader said.
Another central Congress leader said the PDP’s “betrayal” in 2008, which led to the fall of the PDP-Congress alliance government, was also weighed upon when the question of NC or PDP arose during parliament polls.
A senior PDP party leader opined that the on-and-off return of Muzaffar Baig and his wife Safina Baig along with taking back deserters, who had joined BJP-allied parties since 2018, also led to people’s trust in the party waning away.
However, post-results Iltija Mufti has again reiterated that the party’s loss in the assembly polls wasn’t because of their alliance with the BJP but rather because of the “assault” on the party.
Losing Jamaat
While the alliance with the BJP cost the PDP in terms of public perception, the party is believed to have also lost the support of now-banned Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir (JeI). The JeI, a traditional NC rival that boycotted elections since 1987, had become a purported support base for the PDP since its inception.
However, the PDP’s alliance with BJP followed by the 2016 Kashmir unrest, after the killing of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen Commander Burhan Wani, led to the waning away of the JeI’s support for the PDP.
While scores were killed, maimed and blinded in 2016, the Mehbooba-led government’s worst moment came when she cast aspersions on the presence of slain civilian people near the sites where they were shot at.
“Did these people go to buy toffee and milk?” an angry Mehbooba had shouted in a presser amid the unrest flanked by the then Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh who himself seemed to be taken aback by the former chief minister’s comments.
The continued deteriorating law and order situation particularly in south Kashmir under the Mehbooba-led government led to further killings, injuries and arrests of civilians in the region once considered a party bastion.
Gradually, the JeI support waned for the party as many people affected post-2016 were directly or indirectly associated with the now-banned socio-religious organisation.
Senior journalist Daanish Bin Nabi says while there is a speculation that Jamaat didn’t vote for the PDP in this election, it’s hard to believe that they entirely boycotted the PDP.
“The Kashmiri prisoner factor was an important segment after August 2019. And Kashmiri regional mainstream parties know well how to exploit this in the Valley. So, Jamaat people would completely have boycotted PDP is a hard pill to swallow,” Nabi says, adding that there is a larger debate around Jamaat having ever helped PDP by voting for the party.
A Hope?
While the PDP finds itself at its lowest since 1999, the decimation of the J&K Apni Party, Peoples Conference and Democratic Progressive Azad Party in the current polls, has a glimmer of hope for the PDP, as all three had poached a sizeable number of leaders from the party.
Also, huge expectations of people on the NC, at a crucial juncture of Jammu and Kashmir’s history, coupled with the Union government wielding more power via the Lieutenant Governor in the Union Territory, the PDP can eye a comeback as a formidable opposition to counter the NC wherever it falters.
However, a senior Valley-based journalist says the only way PDP will revive is with the support of New Delhi, who would want to have an alternative to the National Conference.
“In the 2024 Legislative Assembly polls, it might have found that the only two horses that the Indian state can bet on in Kashmir are NC and PDP while actors like Engineer Rashid, Sajad Gani Lone, Altaf Bukhari, and Ghulam Nabi Azad are spent forces who do not hold any clout in Kashmir politics,” he says.
Meanwhile, ltija Mufti, claims that she and her party would bounce back.
“I am Mufti Sayeed’s granddaughter who struggled a lot, but established PDP and broke NC’s back.”
Would the Mufti Sayeed’s PDP revive to reclaim the lost glory? Mehbooba has half begun with dissolving the party structure…
