THE FIRST-EVER Leader of the Opposition of the BJP in Jammu and Kashmir is a legislator who has made his mark as a firebrand leader of the Chenab Valley regions of Kishtwar, Doda and Ramban, which are the parts of Jammu province where the party did not do as well as it had hoped this time.

Significantly, this came less than a month after Union Home Minister Amit Shah, during an election rally in the Padder-Nagseni Assembly constituency for Sharma, a BJP J&K general secretary, appealed to the voters to elect him as MLA, promising that the party would “make him a big man”. Sharma secured a narrow win over NC leader Pooja Thakur, who is the chairperson of the District Development Council, Kishtwar.

Sharma, 47, once worked as a Special Police Officer, who were recruited by the J&K Police in its fight against militancy in the region in the mid-1990s. He won his maiden election in 2014 as a BJP nominee from Kishtwar, defeating Sajjad Ahmad Kitchloo, former National Conference home minister.

The BJP inducted him as a minister in the coalition government it formed with the PDP after the elections.

BJP sources said that Sharma played a key role in the growth of the party in Chenab Valley region, especially after the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019.

When the demand for Scheduled Tribe status by members of the Pahari ethnic group intensified in the Rajouri and Poonch districts, Sharma led delegations to the Centre demanding similar status for the people of Padder in Kishtwar district. As a result, when the Narendra Modi government declared ST status for Paharis, it gave similar status to the Paddri tribe along with Gadda Brahmins and Kolis of Padder.

Padder-Nagseni, from where Sharma contested this time, is a new, Hindu-dominated constituency, carved out of Kishtwar. While Sharma won from Paddar-Nagseni, the Kishtwar seat was won by another BJP candidate, Shagun Parihar, whose father and uncle were killed by militants near their home in Kishtwar in November 2018.

Before delimitation, all the six constituencies in the Chenab Valley were Muslim-majority. But now at least three of the eight seats it comprises now, including Doda West, Padder-Nagseni and Kishtwar are Hindu-majority.

Of the 29 seats the BJP won overall in the Assembly elections, four came from the Chenab Valley region. In 2014 also, it had won a similar number of seats in the region, which then had six Assembly constituencies, indicating that the party’s gamble over the ST status to Paharis didn’t pay off as well as it had hoped.