VOTED OUT: (From above) For outgoing chief minister Farooq Abdullah and son Omar the election results are a rude jolt. Sonia Gandhi and Ghulam Nabi Azad will bargain with the PDP led by Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, seen here with daughter Mehbooba (right).

Like the Romanovs of imperial Russia, the Abdullahs were felled by an October revolution. Actually, there's something about the10th month that spells history for the family long considered Jammu and Kashmir's uncrowned royalty.

It was on Thursday, October 30, 1947, eight days after Pakistan-backed tribal warriors invaded the kingdom of Maharaja Hari Singh, that Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah was appointed "head of the emergency administration". A man of humble peasant stock, the Sheikh was now in effect ruler of his beautiful but ill-fated land. On Thursday, October 10, 2002-three weeks short of the dynasty's 55th anniversary-the Sheikh's party found its government unseated and his grandson, Omar Abdullah, defeated in Ganderbal, considered a pocket borough.

The National Conference (NC), once merely the Muslim Conference but renamed by the Sheikh to give it a broader identity, had been reduced to 28 seats in a legislative assembly of 87. In the Valley, where the NC had won 44 of 46 seats in 1996, the party was down to 18. Omar, who had taken over as NC president from his father, outgoing chief minister Farooq Abdullah, only four months ago was undone by a combination of power room guile and grassroots experience.

The old fox who had eaten up the callow cub was Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, founder of the People's Democratic Party (PDP), a rag-tag grouping just three years old. The PDP is now expected to form a coalition government along with the Congress, which displaced the BJP as the key entity in the Hindu-strong Jammu region. Sundry independents too will have to be part of the arrangement.

OMAR ABDULLAH, President, National     Conference

"Abdullah name no surety" Q. What went against the NC? A. Our biggest failure was that we were unable to sell our successes to the public. Also, certain agencies in Delhi resorted to dirty tricks. To prove the credibility of the elections, they sought to damage the NC. Where did these independents get the money to fight elections? Q. Isn't it a verdict on your performance? A. I took over the NC in June. You cannot expect miracles from me. The Abdullah legacy is no guarantee for success. Q. Didn't the NC suffer because of its failure to deliver on the autonomy plank? A. No doubt, the NC's continuation in the NDA after the autonomy resolution was rejected has had a bearing on the people's thinking. Q. Will you review ties with the NDA? A. No sudden change but if somebody can show me how NC gained from NDA, I'll be glad. MUFTI MOHAMMAD SAYEED, President, PDP "Let there be a cease-fire" Q. Did you expect such a big win for PDP? A. There were strong undercurrents against the NC misrule but no one realised that the anger was so widespread. Q. PDP is known to speak the Hurriyat language short of secession. Did that help? A. Our party articulated the people's hardships, the human rights violations by security forces and the senseless violence. Q. PDP reportedly got the tacit support of militants, especially the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen. A. They might have done that in certain pockets but it shows that even militants want an honourable exit route. Q. Will a new government lead to a breakthrough on the Kashmir issue? A. Election is not an end by itself. We are for dialogue, for cessation of hostilities. Let there be a Northern Ireland type of cease-fire. GHULAM NABI AZAD, President, Kashmir PCC "No pre-1953 status" Q. How do you view the election results? A. It is a mandate for governance. Good governance will be the catalyst of change. Q. How stable will your government be since its survival depends on independents? A. The new government represents the will of the people. No coalition partner would dare wreck the public mandate. What will bind us together is our commitment to live up to the faith and expectation of the people. Q. What is your stand on autonomy? A. We are not for pre-1953 status. The 1975 Sheikh-Indira Gandhi Agreement could be the basis for discussion on autonomy. Q. Omar Abdullah says NC will make life miserable for the Congress-PDP government. A. The NC's worries are understandable because we have promised to probe the misdeeds of the Farooq Abdullah regime. Internationally, the conduct of free and fair polls in Kashmir has been a successful public- relations exercise for India. The NC's defeat has given the Centre more room to negotiate. The Congress may find it hard agreeing to the PDP's extreme views on autonomy.

The reasons for the Abdullah debacle will probably inspire PhD theses some day. The first, most simplistic factor was good old anti-incumbency. Farooq's government paid for six wasted years, a period in which it promised much, delivered little and had the chief minister dividing time between foreign holidays-he left for South Africa after the third of the election's four phases-and the golf course, with occasional visits to the state secretariat.

That aside, Omar's distaste for his father's flamboyant ways-he moved out of the chief minister's residence a few weeks ago-and alienation of the NC's old guard didn't help. The new NC chief replaced a third of his party's sitting MLAs. Yet, of the party's 30 new faces, as many as 21 lost. What's more, the displeased veterans only fuelled rebellion and ate into the NC vote in constituency after constituency.

In 1996, a skeletal turnout had ensured that the NC won. The party had hoped for a repeat this time, calculating that the fewer the votes, the greater its chances of victory. Further, for all its failings, the NC still had the strongest political organisation for any party in the state. This time, in an election all of India hopes will be a turning point in the Kashmir tragedy, nothing worked.

With 47.25 per cent of the voters paying a visit to polling stations in the first phase, more and more people were encouraged to vote in subsequent rounds. In some seats, as many as 76 per cent of electors participated. As for the NC cadre, hamstrung by a discredited government, they were additionally targeted by terrorists.

The state's cleanest election was also its bloodiest. In 45 days of campaigning, 46 political activists were killed. Most of them, including a state minister, belonged to the NC. In 1996, in contrast, only 13 political workers had been assassinated.

Apart from Omar, other NC big guns too were muzzled. Abdul Ahad Vakil, speaker in the dissolved state Assembly, was smug that the militants' boycott call would keep non-NC voters home in Sopore. He was proved wrong. So was Mustafa Kamal, Farooq's brother, who lost to the PDP's Ghulam Hasan Mir in Gulmarg.

The PDP, on the other hand, chose its candidates well, drafting old warhorses with immense local goodwill. The Mufti and his daughter, Mehbooba Sayeed-nicknamed "the AK-47 of Kashmir"-also had the tacit support of militants in their bastion of south Kashmir.

In Jammu the story was at once similar and different. While the Congress surprised even itself by winning five seats in the Kashmir Valley, its success in Jammu was on the cards. It won 15 seats, replacing the BJP as the party of Hindu preference.

The BJP paid a double anti-incumbency price. Ordinary voters were upset because they saw it as backing the NC-which is an NDA partner in Delhi though a BJP rival in the state. The conservative Hindu constituency felt let down by the BJP on the issue of separate statehood for Jammu and a harder line on Pakistan.

The RSS-backed Jammu State Morcha entered into a patchy alliance with the BJP and, with rebel candidates thrown in, made a mess of things. "We were sunk by this mismatched seat adjustment," admits senior BJP leader Chaman Lal Gupta. In 1996, the BJP had won eight seats in Jammu. This time it shared two with the Morcha, which lost all three seats in Jammu city, once a saffron fortress.