Jammu and Kashmir elections: Will BJP hold on to its seats and can the Congress script a comeback?

Will BJP retain its bastions in Jammu

Voters in 40 of the 90 Jammu and Kashmir constituencies queued up at polling booths on October 1 for the final and the biggest phase of the three-phase assembly elections.

The elections, the first after abrogation of Article 370 that gave Jammu and Kashmir special status, will test the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP's) normalcy pitch and its promise of Naya (new) Kashmir.

The party, which has made scrapping of Article 370 a poll issue, is looking to strengthen its hold in the Jammu region and make inroads in Kashmir in the elections that are being held after 10 years.

In the 2014, the BJP won 16 of the 32 seats being voted for on October 1 — the number of constituencies and their boundaries have changed in this time following the delimitation exercise.

The BJP also won both seats from Jammu in the Lok Sabha election in June.

In 2014, it retained eight of the 16 constituencies it won in the previous election, losing one seat to the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (JKNC).

Another regional outfit that did well in 2014 was the Jammu and Kashmir People’s Democratic Party (J&K PDP), which retained all four of the five seats it won in this region in 2008, losing one to the Congress.

The National Conference, on the other hand, could only hold on to two of the seven seats it had won in 2008.

NC’s ally the Congress has had a tough time in the state. The national party has seen its tally fall in two successive elections.

In 2002, the party won nine seats but the count fell to five in 2008 and two in 2014. It could not retain a single seat from 2008 but wrested one from NC and another from PDP.

The Congress lost four of the five seats it won in 2008 to the BJP.

Jammu, Samba, and Kathua have seen a significant drop in poverty, with the number of multidimensional poor in the regions below 3 percent. However, Udhampur is still one of the poorest regions of the erstwhile state.