Mehbooba Mufti: Tracking her rise to Jammu and Kashmir's top job

Later today, People’s Democratic Party (PDP) chief Mehbooba Mufti will be sworn in as Jammu and Kashmir’s chief minister. The swearing-in will take place at the Raj Bhavan in Jammu. She will become the state’s first woman chief minister, succeeding her father Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, who passed away in January. Since his passing, the state has been under Governor’s Rule, thanks to the deadlock between the PDP and its coalition partner, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) surrounding government formation in the state.

Last week, in a unanimous decision, PDP legislators elected Mufti as their legislature party leader, a process which essentially cleared the decks for her to become the state’s chief minister. Currently, Mufti is a sitting Lok Sabha member of parliament from Anantnag since 2014. She previously won the seat in the 2004 general elections.

Here’s Mint’s coverage of Mehbooba Mufti over the last six months:

In an interview to Mint, on the sidelines of the HT Leadership Summit, Mufti said, “We have been looking at Kashmir through the prism of security. So, everything becomes a security issue. So, we need to be more humane, we need to be cautious, there are no two opinions about it, we need to be cautious, but at the same time not be so over-obsessed by security. We need to go beyond.” She added, “It is not about Jammu and Kashmir government or central government, but it’s about the whole nation. They need to invest in Kashmir’s peace. The idea of Jammu and Kashmir being an integral part of India has to go beyond the ownership of land. You need to own, acknowledge the pain, the sufferings, the other things that are going on. You talk about so many people in the funeral, did any channel take the trouble to show that there were 25,000 people on 15 August this year, nobody bothered because you don’t bother to show that Indian flags are flying somewhere, people are coming for 15 August.”

In his column, Mint deputy managing editor Anil Padmanabhan wrote this about Mufti, the J&K chief minister designate, “Mehbooba Mufti, it is clear, is unlikely to be trapped in silos of either gender or religion. Not being stereotyped is critical, if indeed this fascinating political experiment—an alliance between the BJP and the PDP—has to play out in Jammu and Kashmir. Mufti Mohammad Sayeed had shown exemplary political courage to ink the deal, but most forget that this would not have been possible without an endorsement from his daughter and party president.”

Ashwaq Masoodi, in her story on Jammu and Kashmir’s women politicians (or the lack of their participation), writes about significance of Mufti’s election as CM. “In a state where even men are apprehensive about joining mainstream politics, it’s no surprise that women are, more or less, missing from the political landscape. In an interview with Business Line newspaper, as quoted by an article in the International Museum of Women, an online platform, Mehbooba Mufti said, “...In a situation where it is difficult to find even good men to come forward and contest—they demand security which we can hardly promise—it is a little too much to expect women to rise above their role in such a traumatized society and come forward to participate in the political process.”

In this piece, we look at a brief history of political alliances in the state, the first of which came in 1987 and how coalition governments have since fared. The BJP, is a first-time participant in the Jammu and Kashmir state government, largely thanks to its impressive showing in the Jammu and Ladakh regions of the state.

Following her swearing-in as J&K chief minister today, Mufti will become the 16th woman to head a state government. There are currently four women chief ministers in India—Mamata Banerjee (West Bengal), J. Jayalalithaa (Tamil Nadu), Anandiben Patel (Gujarat) and Vasundara Raje (Rajasthan).