#dnaEdit: Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, the astute politician

The Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, who passed away on Wednesday, was the practised politician in a positive sense of the term. He navigated through the dangerous shoals of the state’s politics over four decades. The best gambit of his politics came when he chose to align with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to form the government last year. He knew the imperatives of the situation and took perhaps the boldest decision ever in the political history of that state. His People’s Democratic Party (PDP) won the majority of seats in the Kashmir Valley even while it was outflanked by the BJP in Jammu. Mufti grasped the difficult fact that it was necessary to bridge the political gulf between the two parts of the state. He did this without appearing to have compromised his own brand of politics for the sake of being in power. There is, no doubt, that the BJP leaders, too, were willing to play ball. But the burden of making the PDP-BJP alliance acceptable to the people of the state rested on Mufti’s shoulders, and he carried it off with enviable ease. And he could perform that feat only because he understood the sentiments of the people, their needs and demands. 

Mufti moved across the political arc from being a Congress leader, who stood up to the domineering presence of National Conference (NC) and Sheikh Abdullah, to that of the Janata Dal leader under VP Singh. He became the first Muslim home minister of India in 1989. The credit would, of course, go to Singh for taking the decision. But Mufti, on his part, inspired that kind of trust as well. It was a short stint which ended on a sour note, both at personal and political levels. His daughter, Dr Rubiya Sayeed, was kidnapped, and there was the controversial swap with the militants. 

It seemed that his career had reached an impasse. But he reinvented himself as a state politician, keeping his ear to the ground. He became the credible alternative to the NC in state politics, and maintained the balance of power which was so badly needed. He stayed the course through electoral ups and downs, winning the election in 2002 through an alliance with the Congress. Though the PDP did not have the majority, Congress president Sonia Gandhi recognised the wisdom in allowing him to be the chief minister for the first three years. Here was a politician who could align directly with both Congress and the BJP if the situation so demanded, and yet retain his credibility in the politically high-strung state. One of the most daunting challenges before a Kashmiri politician is not to be seen as a puppet of either the central government or the national parties. Mufti succeeded in keeping his image of an unbending Kashmiri politician.

At a different level, Mufti  had to walk a political tightrope in remaining sympathetic to the sentiments of the militants and separatists, even at the risk of being perceived as a pro-separatist leader in the rest of the country, and at the same time to steer the politics of the state along national lines. As a confidence-building measure, he took the risk of freeing up as many political prisoners in the state as was possible during his stint as chief minister in 2002, without breaking the constitutional framework. He did it again in 2014 when he allowed the dissidents and separatists to retain their autonomous pace, which kept the political atmosphere vibrant without becoming turbulent. The state will surely miss his healing touch.