The 5-year-old People’s Alliance for Gupkar Declaration (PAGD) is on the brink of collapse in Jammu and Kashmir as the two main constituents, the National Conference (NC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), are at loggerheads on the issue of seat-sharing shortly before the Lok Sabha elections.

Incidentally, both parties are also part of the INDI bloc that was established last year with the aim to throw the BJP out of power in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. However, both these conglomerates are now on the brink of collapse due to serious differences between them. This discord arose after the NC vice-president announced that his party would not spare even a single seat for the PDP in the Kashmir valley, which is the latter’s political stronghold.

The PAGD was formed on 4 August 2019, a day before the BJP government abrogated Article 370 and put the regional leaders under house arrest. The long-time foes, NC and PDP, came under one umbrella to fight for the restoration of Article 370 and statehood of J&K.

The uncompromising stance of Omar Abdullah on the issue of conceding the south Kashmir’s Anantnag seat to the PDP has cast clouds on these alliances, political observers say. Omar said that the NC was currently representing all three Lok Sabha seats in Kashmir, while the PDP, which ranked third in the 2019 elections, has no right to claim the Anantnag seat.

However, Mehbooba deflated Omar’s justification by pointing out that the NC had lost all three seats in 2014. NC chief Dr. Farooq Abdullah also lost the election and Omar himself lost the assembly polls from the Ganderbal constituency. Losing an election in the past does not bar any political party from contesting future elections, she said.

However, Congress and some other constituents of the PAGD are examining the possibility of defusing the situation by working out an acceptable formula.

Mehbooba accused Omar of damaging the alliance more than the BJP. Omar announced on Friday that the NC will contest all three seats of Kashmir and leave the two in Jammu for the Congress, thereby keeping the PDP out of the electoral arena.

Tension had been brewing between the NC and the PDP as activists of both parties were raking up events of the past to malign each other. The PAGD did not hold any meeting during the past few months.

The trigger came recently when Mehbooba’s daughter, Iltija Mufti, compared the recent ‘rigging’ in Pakistan, aimed at keeping Imran Khan’s PTI out of power, with J&K’s assembly elections of 1987 when the NC was in power. “For the people of Kashmir, it’s reminiscent of the 1987 election followed by mass electoral fraud. There are uncanny similarities between the crackdown on Jamaat leaders then and the PTI now. People of J&K continue to pay a price with their lives because of the violence unleashed by the rigged 1987 election,” she said in a written statement.

NC activists retort that during his tenure as the Congress chief in 1984, Mufti Sayeed (Mehbooba’s father) engineered defections from the duly elected NC government headed by Farooq Abdullah and made GM Shah (Farooq’s brother-in-law) the chief minister of J&K.

Former deputy chief minister and BJP leader Kavinder Gupta said that following NC’s deceit, the “marriage of convenience among the PAGD constituents has ended in tragedy.”