After biting the dust in last year’s Assembly polls, the Jamaat-e-Islami-backed faction has launched a new political party, the JDF, which plans to contest the upcoming panchayat and municipal polls and could impact their outcome in parts of the Valley. A report by Riyaz Wani
Banned Jamaat-e-Islami-backed candidates in Jammu and Kashmir who unsuccessfully fought last year’s Assembly election have launched a new political party to contest the upcoming panchayat and municipal body elections in the union territory.
Christened as Jammu and Kashmir Justice and Development Front (JDF), the party will officially be launched in March, one of its leaders, Talat Majid, told media.
Talat himself began his political innings with the Apni Party led by Altaf Bukhari in 2023, and subsequently contested the 2024 assembly elections as an independent candidate from the Pulwama assembly constituency, which he lost.
Shamim Ahmad Thoker, the panel member of the banned Jamaat-e-Islam, said he will be the president of the new party, while Abdul Rehman Shalla from Baramulla will be its vice president and Sayar Ahmad Reshi its general secretary. Reshi also unsuccessfully fought the last year’s Assembly election.
Jamaat, which was banned by the central government in 2019 for its alleged links to militant outfits, had fielded some 10 candidates as Independents in the assembly elections last year including Sayyar Ahmad Reshi and Talat Majid in South Kashmir. None of them won despite tapping into Jamaat’s long standing cadre. Other than Reshi, who contested the elections against communist leader MY Tarigami, and polled 25000 votes, all others lost their deposits.
However, the irony of the Jamaat’s decision to contest polls wasn’t lost on anyone and had been met with some social media backlash, largely from unidentified accounts. Many saw Jamaat participation as a betrayal of the separatist cause they earlier espoused, and in pursuit of which thousands of lives were lost.
Omar Abdullah then publicly articulated a widely felt sentiment. “An organization that spent the last 30 plus years telling the people of Kashmir that elections are Haram (prohibited) and that they should not participate in these elections is now turning around and doing the same,” Omar told reporters in Srinagar at the time.
In the earlier elections held over the last two decades, Jamaat cadre was perceived to have been the lynchpin of the PDP’s support base, especially in South Kashmir seats. Jamaat candidates, when confronted with difficult questions about their party’s past role, explain that they became a part of the separatist movement and militancy more by circumstance than by conviction.
The newly floated party now plans to contest the panchayat and municipal body elections and could certainly be a potential factor in deciding their outcome in parts of the Valley believed to be their traditional strongholds. The party could very well win a few seats here and there marking their return to power politics, albeit still at the grassroots level. However, while the new party name makes it possible for the leaders to escape the banned label of their parent party, it can also detach them from the Jamaat ideology and its followers.
The central government, on the other hand, remains deeply skeptical of Jamaat even while it may have encouraged its leaders to join mainstream politics. Police recently raided dozens of bookshops and seized hundreds of copies of books by Maulana Maududi, founder of Jamaat in India. Police said searches were based on “credible intelligence regarding the clandestine sale and distribution of literature promoting the ideology of a banned organisation (Jamaat)”. Although, the authorities did not name the author, store owners said they had seized literature by the late Abul Ala Maududi.
Moderate Hurriyat chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq condemned the police action. “Cracking down on Islamic literature and seizing them from bookstores is ridiculous,” Mirwaiz said in a statement, pointing out that the literature was available online. “Policing thought by seizing books is absurd — to say the least — in the time of access to all information on virtual highways.”
