Mahim Gupta
Early Times Report
Jammu, Aug 23: For the first time since the days of the Praja Parishad and the Jan Sangh — the ideological forerunners of today’s Bharatiya Janata Party — the party has taken its most consequential organisational exercise into the heart of the Kashmir Valley. On Sunday, Srinagar became the venue for the BJP’s first-ever State-level Core Body meeting, a two-day gathering that began August 23 and will run through August 24, marking a deliberate and symbolically loaded departure from decades of Jammu-centric politics.
The optics are unmistakable. A party that has never won a single Assembly seat in the Valley chose the Valley’s summer capital to plot its next move — a signal, party insiders suggest, that the BJP is done treating Kashmir as unreachable territory.
The meeting brings together the BJP’s entire Jammu and Kashmir leadership architecture: senior functionaries from the Union Territory, sitting Members of Parliament, MLAs, members of the State Core Committee, office-bearers, and a contingent of senior leaders dispatched from Delhi. The format is split by design — the State Core Committee and top office-bearers meet on August 23, while Jammu’s BJP MLAs join the organisational deliberations on August 24, ensuring both the party’s power centre and its untested frontier are represented under one roof.
On paper, the agenda reads as routine business: organisational review, a stock-take of the party’s functioning, and a roadmap for the road ahead. In practice, the choice of city does the talking.
The BJP’s Kashmir problem is stark in the numbers. In the 2024 Assembly elections, the party swept 29 seats — every one of them in Jammu. The Valley delivered nothing.
Yet buried in that defeat is the data point the party is now building on. In Gurez, BJP candidate Faqir Mohammad Khan — a former MLA for the constituency — pushed National Conference’s Nazir Ahmad Khan to the wire, falling short by just 1,132 votes: 7,246 to 8,378. It was the closest the BJP came to a Valley seat anywhere in the election, and Khan crossed the 40 per cent vote-share mark in the process. The party finished runner-up in two other Kashmir constituencies as well.
That distinction — between building a party machine and finding candidates who can actually win Valley seats — is now central to the BJP’s strategy. Grassroots workers and office-bearers can be recruited and trained. Winning Assembly seats requires something harder to manufacture: politicians with standing, local networks, and the ability to read constituency-level politics. The Gurez result is being read inside the party as proof of concept for exactly that kind of induction strategy — pulling in seasoned political operators from across the spectrum and converting them into a functioning grassroots organisation.
The BJP now faces a two-part test. It must keep building the organisational scaffolding — workers, office-bearers, booth-level structures — while simultaneously hunting for the kind of politically seasoned, locally credible candidates that turned Gurez into a near-miss rather than a rout. Discipline and credibility, sharpened by the Pulwama episodes, will need to hold if the party wants new entrants to trust the fold they’re joining.
Symbolically, Sunday’s meeting already marks new ground: the first time since the Praja Parishad and Jan Sangh era that the party’s most important organisational conclave has been held inside the Kashmir Valley rather than in Jammu or Delhi. Whether that symbolism converts into votes will depend on whether the BJP can replicate the Gurez formula — an experienced, locally rooted candidate — across enough constituencies to turn near-misses into victories.
The Srinagar meeting may not deliver a seat. But it has set a direction. The next test for the BJP is whether it can find more Faqir Mohammad Khans — and finish what he started. |
