Is Ghulam Nabi Azad's party a non-starter in J&K?

New Delhi: Three months after its launch by Congress rebel and former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, the Democratic Azad Party (DAP) appears to be withering away.

The DAP suffered a major blow as 126 leaders and workers quit it after Azad expelled three top functionaries -- former assembly speaker and deputy chief minister Tara Chand, ex-minister Manohar Lal Sharma and former legislator Balwan Singh -- for hobnobbing with the Congress.

Azad acted against these leaders as they were planning to join the Bharat Jodo Yatra of former Congress president Rahul Gandhi during its Jammu and Kashmir leg.

The move prompted two prominent DAP members and die-hard Azad loyalists -- Jammu and Kashmir High Court Bar Association president MK Bhardwaj and Jammu district president Vinod Sharma -- to leave the party.

These are ominous signs for Azad who in August this year severed his over five-decade-long association with the grand old party to form his own political outfit.

Within 3-4 months, Azad seems to have lost the plot. Those he expelled had stood by him for years in Congress.

They also cited his days in the Congress, the inner democracy of the grand old party and the magnanimity of its leadership, insisting that despite being an important part of the group of 23 dissidents, also known as G-23, he was not expelled from the organisation.

They alleged that his agenda was to divide the secular bloc in Jammu and Kashmir to help the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Right from the beginning, the DAP had been dubbed as an offshoot of the BJP and Azad so far has not been able to counter that allegation.

Perhaps this is also the reason why the DAP hasn't been able to create any space for itself despite all the hype. A lot of people in Jammu and Kashmir claim that the DAP has been formed at the BJP's behest to divide the Muslim vote in the erstwhile state.

Azad had some pockets of influence in the Muslim-dominated constituencies of the Jammu region and it was widely expected that the DAP would gain some acceptance in those areas. The exit of these senior leaders is likely to further dent the prospects of Azad’s party in the Jammu region.

In the Kashmir valley, the DAP has been a non-starter right from day one given his perceived closeness to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP.

His repeated statements that he will not mislead the people over the issue of Article 370 as only a government with a two-thirds majority in Parliament can ensure the restoration of the provisions also did not go down well with a large section of the people in Kashmir.

It remains to be seen how far his promises of the restoration of statehood, land rights and employment to natives will take him and his party.