Engineer Rashid: The Kashmiri politician whose return from jail ruffled feathers

Within hours of being released on 11 September, Rashid told the media that he was going to fight against the removal of Article 370.

The article allowed the state its own constitution, a separate flag and freedom to make laws. Foreign affairs, defence and communications remained the preserve of the federal government.

“We don’t accept Prime Minister [Narendra Modi’s] decision taken on 5 August [2019],” he said, referring to the day when the autonomy was abrogated.

He then went live on Facebook, repeating similar messages. The hour-long speech currently has more than 2.5m views, 44,000 likes and 25,000 comments – an unusually high number for a regional politician.

Rashid’s popularity worries his regional opponents, who have termed him a “proxy” of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Two former chief ministers of the state and the heirs of leading regional parties, Mehbooba Mufti and Omar Abdullah, have publicly questioned his party’s funding and alleged that he was dividing voters to favour the BJP.

He has repeatedly denied, external the allegations. “If I were a BJP man, I wouldn’t have spent over five years in jail,” he told the BBC. “I won [almost] 500,000 votes in the general elections, how could I be dividing votes?”.

Prof Sheikh Showkat Hussain, a political analyst, said Rashid’s release from jail just days before the elections did give his opponents a pretext to accuse him of collusion with the BJP-run federal government in Delhi.

“Despite these allegations, his win in the 2024 parliamentary elections from jail has given him an unprecedented credibility in the eyes of the locals,” he said.

Rashid has also worked hard to carefully craft his image.

Unlike the valley’s prominent leaders who have established political lineages, Rashid has managed to establish an image of a “common man’s politician” who doesn’t shy away from taking on authorities.

In 2012, he attempted to bring dozens of dogs into the state secretariat as a protest against the government’s inaction on the growing canine menace in his constituency, where numerous dog bite incidents had been reported.

“I hope the ministers and bureaucracy now understand the seriousness of the issue,” he said, external at the time.

But Rashid’s bluntness and candour have also landed him in trouble.

In 2015, he hosted a “beef party” to protest a ban on the slaughter of cows, considered sacred by many Hindus, in several states. A day later, members of the BJP, then a part of the state’s ruling coalition, assaulted him in the assembly, external.

A few days later, members of a Hindu group outraged by the “beef party” attacked him at Delhi’s Press Club, dousing his face with ink as he protested the lynching of a Kashmiri truck driver accused of cow smuggling in Jammu.