Devender Singh Rana, whose supporters often hailed him as the “voice of Jammu”, was the first politician in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir to initiate a process of having a political narrative emanate from the plains.

So, with all the Kashmir Valley-dominated parties united under the banner of the People’s Alliance for Gupkar Declaration (PAGD) to protest against the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019, Rana resigned from the National Conference (NC) in 2021 and wrote to more than 200 people, including prominent citizens and leaders of all major parties, proposing a Jammu Declaration.

The 59-year-old Nagrota MLA who died at a hospital in Faridabad in the National Capital Region on Thursday night joined the BJP in 2021. According to Rana, the Jammu Declaration was an evolving concept that the region, which has decades-long pent-up feelings of being discriminated against by successive governments in Srinagar, must have a voice for if Jammu and Kashmir had to truly become “inclusive”.

Rana, the younger brother of Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh, was born in the village of Malhiri in Doda district in 1965. Like his father and another brother, both engineers, Rana studied civil engineering at the Regional Engineering College (now NIT) Kurukshetra, graduating in 1986. His interests lay in engineering, management, consumer rights, environment, and strategic affairs, authoring several papers on these subjects

Rana became a general secretary of the Jammu Consumer Council in 1989, with prominent journalist and Kashmir Times founder Ved Bhasin appointed its chairman. The council was an active consumer organisation, working to bridge the gap between people and the administration during the Governor’s rule that lasted till 1996.

Shri Devender Singh Rana Ji’s untimely demise is shocking. He was a veteran leader, who worked diligently towards Jammu and Kashmir’s progress. He had just won the Assembly polls and had also played a noteworthy role in making the BJP stronger in J&K. In this hour of grief, my… pic.twitter.com/ohmAFJ8UJl

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) November 1, 2024

Rana joined active politics in 2000, becoming associated with the NC. A year later, he was appointed media advisor to the then party president Omar Abdullah. In 2006, Rana became a member of the now-defunct state Legislative Council and remained a legislator till 2018. Appointed political advisor to then CM Omar Abdullah from 2009 to 2011, he was elected to the Assembly from Nagrota, a Hindu-dominated constituency, in 2014 despite a Narendra Modi wave sweeping the plains. Rana also served as the NC’s provincial president for a decade starting in 2011.

Despite opposition from his colleagues in the NC, he demanded a public holiday on the birth anniversary of Kashmir’s last Dogra ruler Maharaja Hari Singh. He even confronted his party colleague Mohammad Akbar Lone in the erstwhile state Assembly when the latter raised pro-Pakistan slogans on the floor of the House in 2018.

Amid the churn caused by the events of 2019, Rana finally ended over two decades of ties with the NC in 2021 and moved to the BJP, a natural home for his politics of rights for Jammu. After joining the BJP, he organised the first-ever BJP rally in the Muslim-dominated Bathindi area of Jammu, where many NC leaders, including former CMs Dr Farooq Abdullah and Omar, lived.

With his exit, the NC lost not just its main link to Jammu and “personal connect” with people from all communities across the province, but also several other leaders, including sitting corporators, former minister Surjit Singh Slathia, and first-time MLA Kamal Arora, who had won on an NC ticket in 2014 from Bishnah despite a BJP wave. Arora returned to the NC before the Assembly polls this year.

A strong votary of Jammu rights even during his years in the NC, Rana decided to float the idea of the Jammu Declaration to evolve a consensus among the people of the region to have their own political narrative as he felt that certain voices wanted the division of Jammu region based on religion and geography since the abrogation of Article 370. These forces, he believed, needed to be defeated by creating a narrative representing the “pluralistic ethos of Jammu” and addressing the faultlines that exist within the region and between Jammu and the Kashmir Valley.

In the recent Assembly elections, Rana won again from Nagrota and was among the contenders for the office of Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly.