No BJP candidate in Kashmir

The Kashmir valley, which comprises three constituencies-Srinagar, Baramulla and Anantnag-Rajouri, will vote on May 13, May 20, and May 25, respectively.

This is the first major election in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) since August 2019, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government revoked J&K’s autonomy, stripped it of statehood, and split it into two federally-run units or union territories (UTs) – J&K and Ladakh.

The ruling BJP has not fielded a single candidate from all three constituencies in the ongoing Indian parliamentary elections.

Of the 543 constituencies voting in the multiphase general elections, the three Kashmir constituencies are the only ones in the country where neither the BJP nor a party that is its pre-poll ally is in the fray.

Kashmiri analysts say that even if the BJP had contested, it would not have won a single seat. Indeed, the “rejection of its candidates by Kashmiri voters” would have been so “massive” that they would have “lost their security deposits,” a professor at the Kashmir University in Srinagar said.

Under Indian election rules, candidates who receive less than one-sixth of the total number of votes forfeit the amount they deposit at the time of filing their nominations.

In the 2019 parliamentary elections, BJP candidates contesting in the three Kashmir constituencies lost their security deposits.

It was Kashmir that was the epicenter of the post-1989 anti-India insurgency. And it was in Kashmir, and Srinagar in particular, where opposition to the Narendra Modi government’s controversial revocation of Article 370 was strongest.

Over the past three decades, election campaigns in Kashmir were low-key and voter participation was dismal.  Voter turnout in the Srinagar parliamentary constituency, for instance, was 18.63 percent in 1996, 21 percent in 2004 (it was almost nil in Srinagar city), 25.55 percent in 2009, 25.86 percent in 2014, and 14.43 percent in 2019.