I. Ahmad Wani
The sudden emergence of the Nationalist Citizens Party of India from the margins of Indian politics to national prominence offers a textbook illustration of how volatile and unpredictable democratic politics can be. A party that attracted barely 1,200 votes in the 2023 Tripura Assembly elections has found itself thrust into the national conversation after twenty rebel Trinamool Congress MPs reportedly merged with it, transforming an obscure outfit into what some are billing as a significant parliamentary force.
On paper, the development carries the hallmarks of a political earthquake. In practice, it raises a more fundamental question — one that students of Indian political history, particularly those familiar with the tortured political landscape of Jammu and Kashmir, have long learned to ask: can a political party assembled through defections and strategic calculation actually endure?
History, at least in Kashmir, offers a sobering answer.
A Pattern Etched in History
Few regions in India have witnessed as many political experiments as Jammu and Kashmir. Parties have been formed, projected, funded and ultimately abandoned with a regularity that would surprise observers from other parts of the country. Yet each experiment has carried within it the same fundamental flaw — the belief that political organisation can substitute for political legitimacy.
The most instructive example dates to 1984, when the elected government of Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah was dramatically toppled and a breakaway faction led by Ghulam Mohammad Shah established the Awami National Conference. Backed by political engineering and defections from the ruling National Conference, the ANC was presented as a credible and formidable alternative to the region’s dominant political family. The projection was confident. The execution was ambitious. The outcome was instructive.
The Awami National Conference gradually faded from public consciousness. Today it struggles to register any meaningful presence in Kashmir’s political discourse, let alone influence elections. The defectors who had crossed over with great fanfare found themselves stranded in a formation that lacked the one thing no amount of political architecture can manufacture: genuine public trust.
The People’s Democratic Party, launched in 1999 by Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, appeared initially to contradict this pattern. Unlike the ANC, the PDP succeeded in capturing the public imagination of a significant section of Kashmiri voters. It formed governments, disrupted the National Conference’s long dominance and altered the region’s political landscape in ways that few had anticipated. For a period, the PDP seemed to prove that new political formations could indeed take root in Kashmir.
Yet even this relative success proved fragile. Internal contradictions, ill-judged alliances — most notably the controversial power-sharing arrangement with the Bharatiya Janata Party following the 2014 assembly elections — and a gradual disconnect from its core constituency steadily eroded the party’s standing. A formation that once seemed to represent a genuine alternative today struggles to recapture its earlier momentum.
The most recent and perhaps most telling experiment came in the aftermath of the constitutional changes of August 2019. The Apni Party, widely perceived by political observers as a Delhi-backed initiative designed to fill the political vacuum left by the reorganisation of the state and the detention of mainstream political leadership, was expected to emerge as a dominant force. It enjoyed visibility, access and organisational support that most regional parties could only dream of acquiring. Yet when voters were finally given the opportunity to render their verdict, the party’s electoral performance fell well short of the expectations its backers had cultivated.
The Voice from the Ground
What makes these failures particularly illuminating is not the analysis of political commentators or the assessments of academics, but the candid reflections of those who have worked at the grassroots level — the sarpanches, the District Development Council members and the panchayat leaders who have delivered services and implemented programmes in some of the most challenging conditions imaginable.
Javaid Bhat (name changed), a sarpanch from South Kashmir, articulates the frustration with a directness that no policy paper can match. “We delivered on the ground; we have worked for the public,” he said. “But still, they consider us as if we are from another world, as if we have stolen something.”
This is not the complaint of a man who failed to perform. It is the confession of a man who performed and was still rejected — a distinction that goes to the heart of what makes Kashmir’s political environment so distinctive and so difficult for externally constructed formations to navigate.
Mujeeb Khan (name changed), a DDC member from Kupwara district, frames the challenge with equal clarity. “Elections in Kashmir are about balancing emotions and expectations,” he observed. “As a DDC member, we worked more diligently than our MLAs, but we couldn’t make any magical impact on common voters. This is because common voters look for a religious outlook and sentimental affiliations before they vote.”
The observation is striking for what it reveals about the limits of performance-based politics in a society where historical grievances, collective memory and emotional allegiances shape electoral choices in ways that transcend service delivery and development metrics.
Raja Farooq (name changed) from Baramulla is even more direct. “Our voters’ decisions are more sentimental than learned decisions,” he said, “which is why they return to tradition rather than opting for a new experiment.”
Peerzada Saleem (name changed) from Anantnag draws attention to the role of political propaganda in deepening these divides. “The propaganda makes it more complex as we are being terrorised from outer forces and then it is easy to label groups as Team A, Team B,” he said. “Emotions take us to another world where voting for the centre is a crime and voting for a local party is something like religion. After the election, the same elected lot join that very party for which we have been told is dangerous.”
What Durability Requires
Taken together, these testimonies point toward a conclusion that is uncomfortable for political strategists but essential for anyone seeking to understand democratic legitimacy: voters, even in the most complex political environments, are not passive recipients of political projects designed for them. They are active agents capable of distinguishing between formations that have emerged organically from their lived experience and those that have been assembled for purposes they did not originate.
This is not an argument against political competition or against the formation of new parties. Democracies are strengthened by plurality, and history offers examples of new formations that have successfully earned public trust by addressing genuine grievances rather than engineering parliamentary arithmetic. The PDP itself, whatever its subsequent failures, began as a response to a real public mood.
The argument is rather more specific. Political parties built primarily on defections, administrative patronage or strategic calculations — however sophisticated those calculations may be — carry within them a structural vulnerability. They can generate headlines. They can reshape parliamentary equations in the short term. They can secure resources and visibility that organic movements take years to accumulate. What they cannot do, as Kashmir’s political history demonstrates with painful clarity, is manufacture the emotional connection between a party and its voters that ultimately determines longevity.
The Bengal Parallel
Whether the NCPI episode in West Bengal represents a genuine political realignment or another chapter in the long history of parliamentary defections dressed up as political transformation remains to be seen. The twenty rebel MPs bring numbers, visibility and the immediate thrill of disruption. What they bring in terms of grassroots organisation, ideological coherence and public credibility is a question that only time and voters can answer.
Kashmir’s experience does not close the door on political possibility. It merely reminds us that in a democracy, the door that matters most is the one voters open — or refuse to open — on election day. No amount of political engineering has ever found a reliable way around that fundamental truth.
