“It is time for party leaders camping here to take a decision in the matter… It is okay if they reconsider their decision on the mandate change in the Jammu East constituency. Otherwise I will accept the calls from workers who want me to contest as an Independent,” Sharma said, adding that he hoped the people of the seat would support him.

Another party leader, Kashmira Singh, quit in protest against the allocation of the BJP ticket to Surjit Singh Slathia from Samba Assembly seat. “After my 40 years of dedicated service to the BJP, beginning as a polling booth agent to the Samba district president twice, and serving as state president of the Panchayati Raj cell and national council member, the party has now given the ticket to someone it had been fighting politically in the past,” Kashmira Singh said. Slathia, earlier in the NC and a former minister, joined the BJP in 2019.

Sharma, who has been associated with the BJP since the early 1970s, is also the convener of the Save Tawi Andolan, a movement to conserve the Tawi river. However, he has just contested two elections, the 1987 Assembly polls and a Rajya Sabha poll. Fielded by the party from Jammu West in 1987, he lost to then sitting Congress MLA Mangat Ram Sharma by 6,074 votes. In 2015, he lost the Rajya Sabha poll from one of J&K’s two Rajya Sabha seats by one vote.

This time, from the Jammu East constituency, the BJP has decided to field its state unit vice-president Yudhvir Sethi.

Party insiders expressed surprise over Sharma’s resignation, saying his name never figured in the list of probable contenders for a BJP ticket in Jammu East. Although his exit is not likely to affect the BJP’s electoral prospects, it appears to have taken the lid off the discontent prevailing within the party over ticket distribution, party sources admitted.

Over the past three days, angry supporters of some local BJP leaders from the Jammu North and Chhamb constituencies held demonstrations at the party headquarters in Jammu over ticket distribution. In the Mata Vaishno Devi seat, supporters of another probable contender held similar protests at the party office in Katra.

The BJP has so far announced 45 candidates for J&K’s 90 Assembly seats. It had withdrawn its first list within hours of release, reportedly after internal protests over the “sidelining of the old guard”. But had later released the same names with almost no change.

It’s not the first time Sharma has parted ways with the BJP. In 2005, he had quit the party and floated the Praja Parishad Jammu and Kashmir to press for the Jammu region’s “autonomy”. The name of this party drew inspiration from the Jammu Praja Parishad, which had advocated against Article 370 and J&K special status, before merging with the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the precursor to the BJP, in 1963.

However, in 2008, he returned to the party fold. In 2015, he was the BJP’s nominee for a Rajya Sabha seat from J&K, and suffered the one-vote loss to the Congress’s Ghulam Nabi Azad.

In 2018, when the BJP was in power in a coalition government with the Mehbooba Mufti-led Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Sharma was appointed as a non-judicial member of the Jammu and Kashmir Human Rights Commission.