Newsmaker | New J&K Congress chief Tariq Hameed Karra: PDP founding member, defeated Farooq Abdullah in 2014

The decision to appoint Karra as JKPCC chief was under discussion for some months, according to party insiders, especially as his predecessor was “unable to take everyone along”. While there are many power centres in the party’s J&K unit, the Congress believed a senior leader of “stature and experience” should lead it.

“He is more experienced and has a stature. He had remained a Lok Sabha MP also and all these things went into his favour,” said a senior Congress leader. “With elections round the corner, the party high command thought it is time to appoint someone who can take everyone along and is acceptable to different power centres. There is hope that Karra sahib will be able to stem the differences within the party leadership.”

A law graduate, Karra was a founding member of the PDP when it was floated by former Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in 1999 after he left the Congress.

While Karra did not achieve much success in electoral politics and lost to the National Conference (NC) candidate in the 2002 and 2008 Assembly elections, he was rewarded for being a part of the PDP’s founding team. He was appointed the minister of Finance and Law in 2005 when Ghulam Nabi Azad took over as rotational CM from Sayeed.

Karra came under the spotlight in 2014 when he defeated NC president Farooq Abdullah from the Srinagar Lok Sabha seat. It was Abdullah’s first electoral defeat and in a constituency that has been a traditional bastion of the NC.

Karra’s win gave the PDP a foothold in Srinagar and he was seen as the party’s main face from the capital, where the PDP had been struggling to make inroads. In the subsequent Assembly elections in late 2014, the PDP secured five of the eight Assembly segments in Srinagar.

The relations between Karra and the PDP, however, turned sour when the party allied with the BJP to form a coalition government. While Karra opposed this coalition, he was also angry with the party over the inclusion of new faces in the Cabinet, including Altaf Bukhari, who later formed the Jammu and Kashmir Apni Party in 2020. Bukhari’s growing clout in the party didn’t sit well with him. Karra also wanted to return to J&K politics, to which the PDP didn’t agree.

He finally resigned from the PDP in 2016, citing the killing of civilians by government forces during protests. “The party has gone back on its ideals and is treating people much worse than the Nazis,” he had said while resigning in September 2016.

Though he contemplated floating his own party, a few months later in February 2017, Karra joined the Congress. He was soon appointed a member of the J&K Congress Working Committee.

While Karra’s appointment to the top post indicates the Congress’s focus is on the Kashmir Valley and the Muslim regions of Jammu, the party has also appointed two working presidents — Tara Chand and Raman Bhalla — from Jammu to take on the BJP in its traditional stronghold.