Opinion | Budgam Bypoll: Collapse Of A Dynasty, Mirage Of A Victory, Rise Of New Political Psychology |
The Budgam bypoll, results of which were declared on November 14, will be remembered as far more than a routine electoral exercise.
It has, in a single stroke, dismantled political myths that survived for half a century, exposed the vulnerabilities of Kashmir’s oldest political family, and simultaneously revealed the limits of the region’s traditional parties.
Though the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) emerged as the winner in Budgam, the real story lies in what the people refused to accept. The verdict is not a mandate; it is a message.
For the first time since the early 1970s, the National Conference (NC) lost the Budgam seat – a constituency that had long been spoken of as the “ideological homeground" of the party. This was the cradle from which it drew emotional power, historical prestige and, often, electoral arrogance.
In 2024, present Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and the NC had secured an impressive 38,000 votes from here. Only a year later, that number crashed to just 17,000.
Such a collapse cannot be explained by political arithmetic alone. It requires political anthropology. The voters did not merely shift; they walked away.
Much of this erosion is rooted in Omar Abdullah’s troubled return to power last year. When he and his party re-entered the political arena with a powerful narrative of poll promises and manifesto, people believed.
The NC manifesto had ambitious commitments: they spoke of generating one lakh government jobs, providing 200 units of free electricity to poor households, delivering free or heavily subsidised rations through an enhanced ‘Antyodaya Anna Yojana’ (AAY).
Abdullah’s handling of the smart meter controversy, which had already troubled large segments of the population – last year, during his poll campaign, he had regularly spoken against the forced installation of smart meters and projected himself as protector of the common man, but when confronted recently on the issue, his startling justification that his own aunt and sister were using smart meters and, therefore, the rest should accept them directly contradicted the NC’s earlier rhetoric and exposed the gulf between promise and practice.
This was perceived not only as a retreat from his manifesto but as an admission that the NC’s earlier stance was mere electoral posturing. The result was clear in Budgam: promises that once generated optimism had curdled into public anger and a sense of betrayal, and Abdullah’s shifting position on smart meters and other key poll promises became a symbol of a larger pattern of inconsistency........