The cross-voting of Bharatiya Janata Party lawmakers in the legislative council elections has again exposed the immaturity of the democratic set up in Jammu and Kashmir. The unscrupulous act of the BJP legislators of voting against their party whip and allegedly receiving cash for voting for the candidates of ruling coalition also exposes that there are no ideologies in politics, which though flaunted forcefully, are seldom followed in practice.

The expose of the act was led to the embarrassment of BJP, which had got the highest ever number of seats in the state legislature converting the raised passions over the land row into votes. The elections to the state assembly were held soon after the land row agitation in which the right parties at Jammu enforced an economic blockade of the rest of the state. The party’s poll plank of fighting for rights of Jammu and the propaganda of discrimination of Jammu at the hands of “Kashmir centric governments” in the state played a major roll in appealing to the voters in the region who voted 11 candidates of the party to the state legislature. Bharatiya Janata Party has at the national level has been targeting the ruling congress party for indulging in corruption after the unearthing of various scam like common wealth games scam, the 2G bandwidth allocation scam and has been projecting itself as a clean party. Caught on the wrong foot the party is prone to be targeted by the congress in New Delhi.

The people who voted the BJP have been shocked. Many Sangh Parivar and BJP activists have held angry demonstration in the winter capital against the defecting MLAs. The slogans they are shouting and the banners carried by them show the hurt and anger they are feeling from the unscrupulousness of their democratically elected representatives.

 The MLAs have brought shame to the party and almost sounded the elimination of BJP from the political equation of the state. In a damage control exercise the party forced all its MLAs to resign though only seven of them had voted against the party whip. But that appears to be a drama. They sent resignations  to the party president at New Delhi instead of the Speaker of the state Assembly. The party may want them to stay in the house till next elections because political expediency demands it. Moreover, it affirms that there are no ideologies in politics. More so in J&K where democracy means little more than holding elections.

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