This is an election of many firsts in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). It is the first parliamentary election after the State of J&K was bifurcated into the two Union Territories, and its special constitutional status scrapped, on August 5, 2019. This is also the first election in which the next generation of influential families in the region — the Abdullahs, Muftis, and Azads — are plunging into politics, even as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) continues to attack the practice of dynastic politics, a strategy which it hopes will help it keep these political families in J&K at bay.
The reins of the National Conference (NC), a party which was founded by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah in 1939, has remained firmly with the Abdullahs for more than nine decades despite the efforts by rivals, both within and outside the party, to dislodge them. The name Abdullah remains the pivot of the party.
However, successions have never been a cakewalk. Sheikh Abdullah’s son, Farooq Abdullah, succeeded him as the leader of the party in a formal ceremony on August 21, 1981, at Mujahid Manzil in Srinagar’s downtown area. But given the souring of relations between the Abdullahs and the Gandhi family then, there were apprehensions that the Congress-led Centre would remove Sheikh Abdullah as J&K’s Chief Minister.
