Less than a month after the defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly elections, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leader Ram Madhav raised a question about the mandate.

The National Conference government, Madhav The Indian Express, was not “representative” of the entire Union territory because “the Jammu heartland was missing from it”.

In these first elections held in Jammu and Kashmir since August 2019, when New Delhi unilaterally abrogated the special provisions provided to Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Constitution, the National Conference secured a majority in the Union Territory, sweeping the Valley, while the BJP won the majority of the seats in Jammu province.

The BJP was unable to form a government on its own or with a coalition despite by creating six additional constituencies in Jammu and only one in Kashmir, in the Valley and empowering the to the assembly.

Granting and Other Backward Classes status to some other communities also failed to translate into electoral gains. They failed to give the only Muslim-majority region a.

For the party, the Jammu results were indeed a silver lining. Ninety seats went to the polls in the Union territory. Of the 43 seats in...