Why Modi Dumped Mehbooba

The BJP feared its hard nationalist plank would be affected in 2019. Hence the pre-emptive strike on alliance partner PDP

- Asit Jolly And Uday Mahurkar

It was past noon on June 18 when Amit Shah, then in Guwahati, made a brief call to Ram Madhav, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s general secretary responsible for Jammu & Kashmir. “We need to discuss Kashmir,”he said. “Please call all our ministers [in J&K] to Delhi. I am coming [back] tonight and will hold a meeting.” Up in Srinagar, tipped off that her BJP colleagues were headed for the national capital, Mehbooba Mufti made several calls, but everyone was tightlipped. The next day, the chief minister was clearing pending files in her secretariat office in Srinagar when her chief secretary, Bharat Bhushan Vyas, informed her of the call from Governor N.N. Vohra’s office.

Even as the saffron leadership was informing the governor that it was withdrawing from the ruling alliance, Madhav, flanked by senior party leaders, including a number of ministers from the state, spelled it out to the press in Delhi: “It has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance government in Jammu & Kashmir,” he declared, laying the blame for the collapse of the three-and-a-half-year-old coalition government on the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

The entire exercise was carefully designed to ensure Mehbooba and her party did not have the slightest opportunity to prepare or pre-empt the BJP’s move. Even Sajjad Lone, the Jammu Kashmir People’s Conference legislator who made it into the government as a minister on the BJP’s insistence and is considered close to the party’s top national leadership, admitted there wasn’t a whisper of what was coming.

That the PDP-BJP partnership would end had been more or less a foregone conclusion for some time now. But the surprise is in its timing and the fact that it was the BJP, and not the PDP, that finally opted to pull the plug.