The National Conference-Congress alliance looks set to form the next government in Jammu and Kashmir, which is seeing its first Assembly elections in 10 years, but the scale of the victory has also eclipsed smaller parties that made several headlines in the run-up to the polls.
This year's Assembly polls saw the re-entry of the banned Jamaat-e-Islami in the election process after decades of calling for their boycott and all eyes had been on how its candidates would perform. The interest was heightened after the Awami Ittehad Party of Engineer Rashid, who had defeated National Conference Vice-President and former chief minister Omar Abdullah in the Lok Sabha elections, entered into a "strategic alliance" with the Jamaat.
When the nominations were filed, 10 candidates backed by the Jamaat had entered the fray as Independents but some of them later backed out. Leads showed that all of the Jamaat-backed candidates were trailing in their constituencies.
Despite his surprise victory in the Lok Sabha elections, Engineer Rashid has also not been able to make a mark in the Assembly polls, with only one candidate backed by his party – his brother Khursheed Ahmad Sheikh – leading. The margin, as of 2.05 pm, was only 2,812 votes with four rounds remaining and there was a possibility of the People Conference's Irfan Sultan Pandithpuri pipping him to win the seat.
Ghulam Nabi Azad's Democratic Progressive Azad Party, which was formed in 2022 after he parted ways with the Congress, has also fared badly and is trailing in all of the seats that it contested. The party was already in disarray after losing all three constituencies it had put up candidates for in the Lok Sabha polls, which was its electoral debut, and many leaders had quit after that.
The common thread in all of these failures, experts said, was the perception that these political players had been propped up by the BJP to eat into the votes of the National Conference-Congress alliance. This perception was reinforced by Engineer Rashid getting bail for campaigning just ahead of the elections.
Speculation about closeness to the BJP is also believed to have hurt Mehbooba Mufti's PDP, which is leading in only two constituencies. Ms Mufti's daughter, Iltija, has also conceded defeat from the Srigufwara-Bijbehara constituency.
Mehbooba Mufti had run a government in Jammu and Kashmir in an alliance with the BJP until the tie-up collapsed in 2018. Article 370, which gave Jammu and Kashmir special status, was removed a year later and the state was divided into the two Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.
