How PDP founder Mufti Mohd Sayeed came to make his LS debut from UP

Following Mufti’s win, Prime Minister V P Singh made him the Union Home Minister – which remains the highest ever position held at the Centre by a Kashmiri Muslim.

Sayeed started his political career in the 1950s in the Democratic National Conference, a splinter group of the Jammu & Kashmir National Conference (NC) led by Ghulam Mohammed Sadiq. In late 1960, the Democratic National Conference merged back into the NC, and two years later, he was elected as an MLA from Bijbehara.

After Sadiq became the J&K Chief Minister in 1964, he inducted Sayeed as a minister. A year later, the NC merged with the Congress, and by 1972, Sayeed was the president of the J&K Congress unit.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi spotted Sayeed’s political skills, and in July 1984, he is believed to have helped orchestrate the toppling of the NC government led by Farooq Abdullah by his own brother-in-law, G M Shah, with the help of the Congress.

After Rajiv Gandhi took over following the assassination of Mrs Gandhi, he patched ties with Farooq, given the long family ties. In what was seen as a gesture to Abdullah, he took Sayeed away from Kashmir and brought him to Delhi as Tourism Minister in 1986.

A year later, Sayeed resigned from the Cabinet and the Congress, following in the footsteps of V P Singh, who quit as Defence Minister over the Bofors scam. Sayeed was among the co-founders of the Jan Morcha along with V P Singh in 1989.

Sayeed’s exit also followed the 1987 Rajiv-Farooq Abdullah accord, which reinstated Farooq as CM following a stint of Governor’s rule. This was not to the liking of many leaders, given their history of bitter rivalry.

The reasons Sayeed chose UP to make his Lok Sabha debut were multifold. It was the beginning of the militancy years in Jammu and Kashmir, there were no hopes of an election there in the near future, UP was the battleground of V P Singh, and Muzaffarnagar had a substantial Muslim population.

In 1991, within two years of its formation, the V P Singh government collapsed, torn apart by internal pulls and pressures, and ally BJP’s decision to snap ties as it forged ahead with its Hindutva agenda.

Sayeed’s short Home Ministry stint would be most remembered for the abduction of his daughter Rubaiya Sayeed by militants, leading to the Centre’s capitulation and release of five terrorists to get her back. The Valley also saw the killing of several prominent Kashmiri Pandits during this time, leading to their exodus from Kashmir.

Sayeed rejoined the Congress under P V Narasimha Rao, only to leave it in 1999 to form the PDP. While his first term as CM was from 2002-2005 in coalition with the NC, the second time he came to power was after the 2014 polls, ironically in alliance with the BJP. He died in 2016.

The 2014 elections were the last polls to be held in the erstwhile state of J&K.

It is for election to the new Union territory that has replaced it that the revision of electoral rolls is being conducted now.

The BJP, which is the only party in the UT to have supported the revision – which has run into a row over one estimate that voter numbers might rise by 25 lakh – has also called out the Congress. The BJP reminded the party that the only two times its senior leader and former J&K CM Ghulam Nabi Azad has been voted to the Lok Sabha, it was from Maharashtra.

Incidentally, “non-locals” or, technically those not holding permanent residency certificates of J&K, have always been allowed to vote and participate in the Lok Sabha elections here.

In 2019, consequently, an advocate originally from Uttar Pradesh’s Buddha Nagar, Shams Khwaja, contested the Lok Sabha election from Anantnag as an Independent. He polled 760 votes.