PDP requires to reinvent itself

Arun Joshi

A significant number of former lawmakers have quit the Peoples Democratic Party and a few more are waiting to do so, numbing the party that until some months ago was ruling the state.

It is seen the party is getting purged of men with larger-than-life ambitions. Others, of course, were genuinely unhappy with the style of functioning of the leadership that had come under the influence of a self-serving coterie.

The situational irony is that they waited till the BJP pulled the rug from under the feet of the Mehbooba Mufti government in which a few of them were ministers. This change of loyalties smacks of political expediency. No mistake should be made in reading any ideological reasons in their leaving the party.

At the time of its formation in 1999, the PDP appeared on the political horizon of Kashmir as a group to change the traditional regional politics of patronage. It pitched for peace through dialogue, the idea that appealed to the people who were living in fear of midnight knocks, arrests and extortions. The fear extended from bedrooms to streets.

The PDP gained politically – it secured 16 seats in its first contest in the Assembly elections in 2002. The number went up to 21 in 2008 and finally it emerged as the single largest party with 28 seats in 2014. It undid its original political philosophy of being the champion of Kashmiris’ rights by entering into a Faustian bargain with the BJP to regain power.

Today, PDP president Mehbooba Mufti says it was a “suicide” to form a government with the BJP. She would do better to recall that how commas, full stops and colons were inserted until the last moment in the Agenda of Alliance of the two parties that came out on March 1, 2015.

Soon after the 2014 poll results, the two parties had helped each other win the Rajya Sabha and Legislative Council elections – that speaks a lot for the alliance.

Though Mehbooba has the capacity to rise from point zero, it may not be so easy now as the purity of the PDP has been compromised. She has complicated matters by asking those unhappy with her to leave the party. It has hurt the men who refuse to live by the “put up or shut up” politics of the 20th century. She needs to pick up the threads afresh.