MUZAFFARABAD: In an election already marked by protests, disputed results and orders for repolling, perhaps the most consequential result came quietly from the mountains of Bagh in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir (PaJK).
Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan, former prime minister and president of the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference, lost LA-14 Bagh West, a constituency that had for decades been virtually synonymous with his family.
According to unofficial results, Sardar Sajid Iqbal of the Jammu Kashmir Dast-o-Bazu Party secured 40,702 votes against Attique’s 19,542.
The margin matters. But the symbolism matters considerably more.
This was not merely the defeat of a candidate or even of a former prime minister. It may represent the effective political demise of an organisation whose ancestry goes back to the first organised mass politics of the undivided princely state of Jammu and Kashmir.
For the first time, the Muslim Conference now faces the prospect of having no representation in the Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly.
The party once produced presidents and prime ministers. Governments were formed and unmade around it. Its green flag dominated electoral politics across large parts of the territory.
As recently as 2006, the Muslim Conference emerged as the largest party in the Assembly, winning 20 of the 41 directly contested seats. Attique subsequently became prime minister.
Two decades later, the party is struggling merely to enter the legislature.
That is why the Bagh result cannot adequately be described as an electoral upset. Elections remove politicians all the time. Political parties survive such defeats.
The more difficult question is whether there is still a Muslim Conference capable of surviving Sardar Attique.
The All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference was established in Srinagar in 1932, with Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah as its first president, and Chaudhary Ghulam Abbas among its principal founders.
It emerged from the political awakening following the upheavals of 1931 and became the principal vehicle for mobilising the Muslim majority against the Dogra monarchy.
In 1939, Sheikh Abdullah led the transformation of the Muslim Conference into the National Conference, arguing that the struggle against autocratic rule needed to transcend religious identity.
Political Rupture
The change produced a lasting political rupture. Chaudhary Ghulam Abbas and his associates continued to nurture the Muslim Conference, which increasingly identified itself with the Muslim League and the demand that Jammu and Kashmir should accede to Pakistan.
Thus emerged two political traditions from essentially the same political womb.
The National Conference came to dominate politics in the part of Jammu and Kashmir controlled by India. The Muslim Conference became the principal indigenous political force in the territory administered by Pakistan.
The Line of Control eventually divided not merely geography and families. It divided Kashmir’s political inheritance.
Yet more than seven decades later, an extraordinary transformation has taken place.
The National Conference effectively disappeared organisationally from Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir. The Muslim Conference similarly disappeared from electoral politics on the Indian-administered side. Each surrendered half of the political territory it once claimed to represent.
Into the vacuum came political parties whose command structures lay outside Jammu and Kashmir.
On the Indian side came the Indian National Congress and later the Bharatiya Janata Party, although the National Conference and subsequently the Peoples’ Democratic Party retained substantial regional space and alternately allied or competed with them.
On the Pakistan-administered side, the transformation went much further. The Pakistan Peoples’ Party, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf established local organisations and progressively displaced indigenous parties from the centre of electoral politics.
Two parties born to represent the politics of an undivided Jammu and Kashmir ultimately accepted the political logic of its division.
The National Conference also had its own periods of setbacks.
Only weeks after becoming president of the National Conference, Omar lost the family bastion of Ganderbal in the 2002 Jammu and Kashmir Assembly election. He was defeated by the Peoples’ Democratic Party's Qazi Mohammad Afzal by 3,690 votes.
It was a stunning humiliation.
Yet the National Conference did not disappear.
Its district committees remained. Its workers remained. Its political memory remained. Its cadre structure, accumulated over generations, survived the defeat of its leader.
The party returned to power after the 2008 Assembly elections, with Omar becoming chief minister in 2009.
Twenty-two years after Ganderbal, Omar suffered an even more dramatic personal defeat. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, he contested Baramulla and was defeated by jailed independent candidate Sheikh Abdul Rashid, popularly known as Engineer Rashid, by more than 200,000 votes. The result was one of the biggest shocks of that election in Jammu and Kashmir.
Again, the National Conference survived.
Indeed, later that year Omar contested the Assembly elections, won, and returned as chief minister.
His father Farooq Abdullah had experienced a similar reversal a decade earlier. In the 2014 Lok Sabha election, Farooq lost Srinagar to the PDP's Tariq Hameed Karra by 42,280 votes. It was reportedly Farooq's first electoral defeat since entering active politics in the early 1980s.
Yet nobody wrote the National Conference's obituary.
The Abdullah family unquestionably dominates the National Conference. Sheikh Abdullah was followed by Farooq Abdullah and then Omar Abdullah. Dynastic politics is therefore hardly unique to the National Conference.
The National Conference retained enough organisational existence outside the Abdullah household to absorb the electoral defeats of individual Abdullahs.
The Muslim Conference increasingly failed to do the same.
Tragedy of Muslim Conference
The tragedy of the Muslim Conference is that an organisation that once claimed to speak for Muslims across the entire princely state gradually contracted geographically, politically and institutionally until its survival became inseparable from one family.
After Chaudhary Ghulam Abbas, the dominant personality in the party became Sardar Muhammad Abdul Qayyum Khan.
Whatever judgment history ultimately makes about Abdul Qayyum's politics, his influence on Pakistan-administered Kashmir was enormous.
He served repeatedly as president and prime minister, acquired the honorific "Mujahid-e-Awwal", built a formidable political network and turned the Muslim Conference into the principal electoral machine of the territory.
But therein also lay the seeds of its later weakness. The institution increasingly revolved around the leader.
Then the leader's political inheritance passed to his son.
Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan eventually became party president and prime minister. In 2008, when the Muslim Conference was engulfed in internal rebellion, Attique was elected president for a third consecutive term while his father remained the party's "supreme head". Dissidents challenged both the process and the concentration of authority.
A party born from an anti-monarchical mass movement had, in effect, developed its own succession system.
That contradiction proved costly. The decisive issue is whether the family controls a living organisation or substitutes itself for the organisation.
In the National Conference, despite the Abdullah dynasty, second- and third-tier leaders continued to possess constituencies, district networks and identifiable political bases.
In the Muslim Conference, defections repeatedly stripped away precisely those layers. When powerful leaders saw better prospects in parties enjoying favour in Islamabad, many departed.
Some joined the PML-N. Others migrated towards the PPP. Still others found their way to PTI when Imran Khan became the dominant force in Pakistani politics.
Each migration removed another brick from the Muslim Conference structure. Eventually, the party began to resemble less a political institution than the remaining political estate of the Abdul Qayyum family.
Bagh was its final fortress. Now even that fortress has fallen.
The decline of the Muslim Conference cannot, however, be explained by dynastic politics alone.
Its erosion coincided with a structural change in Pakistan-administered Kashmir: the progressive transplantation of Pakistan's national political parties into the territory.
For decades, Kashmir's distinctive constitutional status had at least nominally encouraged a separate political ecosystem.
The PPP established itself as a major force. The PML-N followed. PTI then entered dramatically.
Elections increasingly became extensions of political contests in Pakistan.
A familiar political assumption developed that the party ruling Islamabad enjoyed an enormous advantage in forming the government in Muzaffarabad.
Tickets, alliances, defections and political loyalties began responding to power across the Jhelum rather than political organisation within the territory.
The Muslim Conference tried repeatedly to accommodate this reality instead of constructing an alternative to it. That strategy may have provided temporary access to power. It gradually made the party redundant.
Political Legitimacy
The National Conference and Muslim Conference once claimed political legitimacy across the entire former princely state.
Yet after 1947, each effectively vacated the territory controlled by the other country. This retreat deserves much greater historical scrutiny than it has received.
Why did the National Conference not maintain an organisational presence in Pakistan-administered Kashmir? Why did the Muslim Conference not retain meaningful political organisation in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir?
There were obvious political, security and legal constraints after the division of the state. Maintaining cross-Line-of-Control political structures became extraordinarily difficult.
The National Conference increasingly became an Indian electoral party operating within Jammu and Kashmir. The Muslim Conference became an Azad Kashmir party functioning within Pakistan's political architecture. Each continued rhetorically to invoke the whole of Jammu and Kashmir.
The indigenous political space of the former princely state was fragmented, leaving national parties from India and Pakistan to occupy the abandoned ground.
The process unfolded differently on the two sides. In Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, regional parties survived. The National Conference remains a major force and is currently in government. The PDP also emerged as another regional pole. Even when these parties allied with the Congress or BJP, they retained separate organisations and political identities.
In Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the indigenous party system has come much closer to complete displacement. Governments are now largely contested among local chapters of Pakistan's national parties.
Under Abdul Qayyum Khan, the Muslim Conference made "Kashmir Banega Pakistan" one of its defining slogans.
Its critics now point to a historical contradiction. The more emphatically the party identified itself with Pakistan, the less political reason remained for Pakistan to need an autonomous Kashmiri political organisation.
If the ultimate objective was complete political identification with Pakistan, why maintain a powerful independent party capable of negotiating with Islamabad on behalf of Kashmir?
The contradictions stretch back to the earliest years of Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
The 1949 Karachi Agreement transferred significant responsibilities concerning defence, foreign affairs, negotiations with the United Nations and administration of Gilgit-Baltistan to Pakistan.
Whatever the circumstances and compulsions under which its Kashmiri signatories acted, the arrangement became central to later arguments over the limited autonomy available to the Muzaffarabad government.
Subsequent confrontations between Kashmiri leaders and Pakistan's Ministry of Kashmir Affairs reinforced the imbalance. K.H. Khurshid, who had served as private secretary to Muhammad Ali Jinnah before becoming president of Azad Kashmir, attempted to articulate perhaps the most ambitious alternative.
Khurshid argued that the Azad Kashmir government should acquire greater international personality and function as a government representing the unresolved state of Jammu and Kashmir, allowing Kashmiris themselves to plead their case internationally.
His political experiment did not survive. Muzaffarabad's political class increasingly learned that access to Rawalpindi and Islamabad could matter more than building autonomous political institutions at home.
The Muslim Conference participated in that system, benefited from it, and was ultimately consumed by it.
Attique's defeat has arrived at an especially revealing moment.
For months, Pakistan-administered Kashmir has witnessed a mass mobilisation around electricity tariffs, wheat subsidies, taxation, governance, elite privileges and the controversial seats reserved for refugees settled in Pakistan.
The Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee has demonstrated that enormous numbers of people can be mobilised without the traditional political parties.
The Muslim Conference could have attempted to reconnect itself with local rights, institutional autonomy and accountable government. Instead, it entered the election carrying the weight of its past but little evidence of a political future.
The electorate in Bagh has now delivered a brutal verdict.
Tough Task of Rebuilding
Another generation of the family, including Sardar Usman Ali Khan, may attempt to rebuild the organisation. Political parties have returned from worse disasters. But resurrection requires something more than preserving a name, flag and family inheritance. It requires cadres, ideology, internal democracy. Above all, it requires a reason for existence.
That is the challenge confronting the Muslim Conference after Bagh.
If its purpose is to defend the political autonomy and distinct identity of Jammu and Kashmir, it must explain why decades of participation in power produced so little institutional independence.
If it seeks to become a regional party again, it must rebuild from villages and union councils rather than drawing rooms in Islamabad and Rawalpindi.
The Muslim Conference and National Conference emerged from the same historic political awakening. They once represented competing visions for the future of an undivided Jammu and Kashmir.
Both eventually retreated behind the Line of Control.
The National Conference survived because, however weakened, compromised or dynastic, it retained a substantial organisation and a distinct regional constituency. Its leaders could lose Ganderbal, Srinagar or Baramulla without the party disappearing with them.
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