J&K polls: Mehboob Beg backs PDP, who will Omar's party fall back on in south Kashmir?

One evening last week, a group of National Conference (NC) workers gathered at the residence of a party activist in south Kashmir’s Anantnag town, a stronghold of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The meeting was called to discuss strategies for defeating the PDP patron and party candidate from Anantnag, Mufti Mohammad Syed.

When senior NC leader, Mehboob Beg, 63, who was presiding over the meeting, began to speak, he recounted the “indifference” of the ministers towards his home town, Anantnag, and how it had resulted in decline of party’s fortunes in the southern side of Kashmir Valley.

Then he dropped a bombshell.

“I am going to support Mufti saheb in the coming election,” Beg, according to a senior leader who attended the meeting, told the gathering.

“Everyone was shocked, except few NC sarpanchs and some village level workers who seemed to be already aware of Beg’s decision. It looked like he had already convinced sarpanchs and other workers to change their loyalties,” he said.

On Sunday, Beg told a convention of NC workers at his home that he was withdrawing his candidature as NC candidate for upcoming elections from Anantnag: “I am not joining any party. I extend unconditional support to Mufti sahib. One reason is that there is a wave in favor of him across the state and we have to stop RSS people from coming to power.”

Hailing from Sarnal village in Anantnag, Beg is the son of Mirza Mohammad Afzal Beg, the state’s first deputy chief minister and a trusted deputy of National Conference’s founder, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah.

However, it didn’t take much time, or thought, perhaps, for Mirza’s son to severe the decades-old association that his father had begun with the party. At the peak of election campaign during the recent Lok Sabha elections, the doctor-turned politician had, according to party’s provincial president for Kashmir, Nasir Aslam Wani, called Mufti Sayeed as a “murderer” of Kashmiri people.

“Beg lashed out Mufti Mohammad Sayeed and PDP for carrying out atrocities on Kashmiris. He held Sayeed responsible for massacres like the one in Bijbehara (in Anantnag district). He was telling people that PDP and BJP were together in it. Now he is saying that Sayeed and PDP can stop BJP. Whatever he had said during the campaign, he has negated that all. He has shown his true face today,” Wani said of Beg joining PDP.

Beg was the only visible face of National Conference in south Kashmir, which is going to polls on December 14. He represented Anantnag constituency in the legislative assembly and later went on to represent the constituency in Lok Sabha till recently when he was defeated with a thumping majority by PDP president Mehbooba Mufti.

Anantnag means abode of springs and the town is regarded as the commercial capital of Kashmir Valley. According to 2011 India census, it has a population of 110 thousand. The constituency is was won by Mufti in the 2008 assembly elections by defeating Beg by around 5000 votes. Beg had triumphed over Mehbooba in 2009 Lok Sabha polls but his constituency, as per Beg’s allegation, didn’t get its share of developmental projects which eroded the little clout and erased the inroads that the party had managed to make in the Mufti stronghold.

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah didn’t mince words about the departure of Beg from his party, taking to Twitter to express himself over the issue: “There can be no denying that Beg’s departure is something NC could have done without but it has been on the cards for a couple of weeks. If the PDP really wants to know what Beg thinks of them just pull out the recordings of his campaign speeches from the last LS polls,” he wrote on the microblogging site.

Political analysts in J&K, too, feel that Beg’s departure was on cards for a long time and it was only a matter of time before he called it a day with NC. “The process is what Omar called the ‘clearing of deadwood’ from the party. Recently Sheikh Ghulam Rasool joined PDP along with his son after staying in NC for two decades. These are evolving combinations and permutations before the upcoming assembly elections,” a professor at University of Kashmir, who didn’t wish to be named, said.

A senior NC leader told Firstpost that this process began when the party suffered a humiliating defeat in the recent Lok Sabha seats. Farooq Abdullah lost his Srinagar seat. From the days of Begum Akbar Jehan, the late wife of Sheikh, Abdullahs had never lost the Srinagar parliamentary constituency. Farooq and his son Omar entered the Indian Parliament through the gates of Srinagar. The defeat was symbolic in more than one way.

“The party called a meeting of senior leaders at its Nawa-e-Subh complex in Srinagar to assess what had went wrong. Farooq was immensely angry and he won’t speak to anyone. It was after a long silence that Omar spoke out. He criticized senior leaders for landing the party in that situation, blaming them for the defeat,” the NC leader said.

There is more to Omar’s outrage against the party’s senior leadership. Over the years, he has come to distance himself from the senior party leaders and raised his own coterie in the party which includes Devender Rana, the party’s provincial president for Jammu and a confidante of Omar, Nasir Aslam Wani and other leaders. He has also played an important role in recruiting new, young people into the party.

“This has isolated senior leadership of the party. I will not be surprised if there are defections after the elections,” the professor at Kashmir University said.

These are signs that political equations are changing fast these days in the Kashmir. Tomorrow’s separatists have no qualms in shaking hands with the “men in saffron.” Friends are turning foes in overnight acts. There is an old, post-partition story which has many versions in Kashmiri imagination.

When Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and his deputy, Mirza Afzal Beg, returned from Pakistan and climbed the stage to address a huge gathering at a ground in Srinagar where J&K High Court is located now, someone from the crowd asked them what they had brought from Pakistan.

Mirza shoved his hand into the pocket, took out a green cloth and waved it at the crowd, evoking emotional, pro-Pakistan slogans.

His son, Mehboob Beg, has finally left the party now, bringing down curtains on decades of his family’s association with National Conference, and he will find peace in the fact that he is siding with Mufti Sayeed (PDP’s party symbol is a pen and inkpot emblazoned on green flag) which, as per Beg’s own admission, has to stop saffron from triumphing over green.