‘Land jihad’ or Kathua rape row: Key J&K Hindu right-wing face joins BJP

Significantly, the Ekam Sanatan Bharat Dal had earlier announced three candidates for the polls – its state president Manoj Padha, Meenakshi Kalra and Srikant Rathore, who contested as Independents from Bhaderwah, Doda-West and Paddar Nagseni Assembly constituencies, respectively. The voting for all three seats happened in the first phase on September 18. Sharma says he had not taken a call on joining the BJP at the time.

His decision to cross over now may prove crucial for the BJP ahead of voting in 24 Assembly constituencies, spread over the hilly Udhampur district and the plains of Jammu, Samba and Kathua, scheduled for the third phase on October 1. The BJP’s hopes of putting up a good J&K performance rest largely on this area, with the party having picked up 18 of its 25 seats in the erstwhile state from here in 2014.

In the recent Lok Sabha polls though, the Ekam Sanatan Bharat Dal had failed to make much of an impact, with Sharma and party colleague Padha together getting less than 12,000 votes across the Jammu and Udhampur parliamentary constituencies they contested in. There are many reasons Sharma is a good fit for the BJP’s politics.

A software engineer and a law graduate, Sharma is a practising lawyer and founder of the IkkJutt Jammu, which was formally declared a political organisation on November 14, 2020. The outfit garnered support advocating the creation of a separate Jammu state and the division of Kashmir Valley into two Union Territories, including one for Kashmiri Pandits. He demanded that the migration of Pandits from Kashmir be recognised as “genocide”, and that legal safeguards be provided to “protect the demography” of areas dominated by Hindus in J&K.

Sharma has also opposed settlement of nomadic Gujjars and Bakerwals (who are largely Muslim) in the forests of Jammu, Samba and Kathua districts as “land jihad’’.

In 2014, while still a law student, Sharma had approached the J&K High Court seeking a CBI investigation into an alleged scam relating to the transfer of government land to “illegal occupants” under the Roshni Act – describing it too as “land jihad’’, meant to change the demography of the Hindu-majority plains of Jammu province.

In 2016, Sharma filed a PIL in the Supreme Court challenging the extension of minority status to Muslims in J&K, where they are in a majority. He has also challenged State control of the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine.

In 2018, he approached the Supreme Court seeking CBI investigation into the rape and murder of a minor Bakerwal girl in Kathua’s Rasana forests. Right-wing outfits, including Ikkjutt, had claimed at the time that the Hindu youths arrested in the case were being falsely implicated.

While his plea for a CBI probe was rejected, Sharma later represented one of the accused during the trial at a Sessions Court in Pathankot.

In 2018, Sharma also shared a “secret classified document’’ pertaining to minutes of a meeting chaired earlier that year by then Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, in which she was stated to have asked district police chiefs that any case against tribal community members (Gujjars and Bakerwals) staying in forests be taken up only after clearance from the Tribal Affairs Department.

The tensions over the Kathua sexual assault and the above leak all contributed to the split between the PDP and BJP, causing their government to collapse. In 2019, Sharma figured in the hit list of the Hizbul Mujahideen.