Did PDP spoil BJP’s game plan in J&K?

A lot of anecdotal reporting was suggesting that independent candidates would damage the prospects of the NC-Congress alliance and make government-formation a complicated affair

Contrary to what most exit polls predicted, the National Conference (NC) and Congress alliance won 49 out of the 90 assembly constituencies in Jammu & Kashmir despite the BJP increasing its seat count from 25 to 29 between the 2014 and 2024 assembly elections. To be sure, the number of assembly constituencies (ACs) has also increased between the 2014 and 2024 elections.

PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti

What explains this victory of the NC-led alliance? The election results are slightly surprising given the fact that NC leader Omar Abdullah lost the Baramullah parliamentary constituency to independent candidate and separatist Rashid Engineer in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. In fact, a lot of anecdotal reporting from the Kashmir region was suggesting that independent candidates, some backed by the Jamat-e-Islami, would damage the prospects of the NC-Congress alliance and make government-formation a complicated affair.

Why did this possibility not arise? HT has done a region-wise analysis of the results to answer this question. To be sure, any statistical analysis of the Jammu & Kashmir results faces a problem because the 2024 elections were held after delimitation, which has changed constituency boundaries, and therefore cannot be compared with previous elections. What can be done, however, is a comparison of party-wise performance at the subregional level.

The BJP has increased its number of MLAs in the new assembly solely on the basis on an improved performance in the Jammu region. In the Kashmir region, the NC has increased the number of its MLAs from 15 to 42 between 2014 and 2024. The Congress’s number of MLAs has fallen from 12 in 2014 to 7 in 2024.

See Chart 1: Absolute number of MLAs in Jammu & Kashmir in 2014 and 2024

Did independent or Jamat-e-Islami backed candidates make any impact in the Kashmir region? A comparison of party-wise vote share for the Kashmir region shows that they have increased their political footprint. The vote share of parties other than NC, Congress, CPI (M), BJP and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has increased from 17.3% to 39.1% between 2014 and 2024 elections. However, the biggest loser in this process is the PDP, which saw its vote share fall from 37.43% to 16.3% in the Kashmir region and not the NC which actually managed to grow at the cost of the PDP.

See Chart 2: 2014 and 2024 vote shares in the Kashmir region

In fact, a comparison of median Effective Number of Participant (ENOP) values shows that Kashmir’s electoral fragmentation is now much higher than that in Jammu when compared with 2014. In the Jammu region, the median ENOP has decreased to 2.6 in 2024 from 3.1 in 2024, indicating a greater polarisation in the region. The median ENOP in the Kashmir region has marginally increased to 3.26 from the 3.23 it was in 2014.

ENOP is defined as the reciprocal of the sum of squares of the vote share of all candidates in a constituency, and a higher value indicates greater political fragmentation in the elections. For example, if there are four candidates in a constituency and they receive 26%, 25%, 25%, and 24% of the votes, the ENOP value will be 3.99. If these vote share numbers change to 50%, 45%, 3%, and 2%, ENOP will fall to 2.2. However, this rise in fragmentation helped rather than hurt the BJP’s principal opposition in the Kashmir region.

Chart 3: Median ENOP values in the Jammu and Kashmir regions