With campaigning entering a decisive phase, it appears that sympathy for the CM has largely dissipated. Divisions within the Uttarakhand unit of Congress are not helping, either.
Six months after Harish Rawat returned as chief minister of Uttarakhand, thanks to the Supreme Court striking down a botched attempt by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to dislodge him, amid a groundswell of public sympathy, he has lost much of those gains.
Not only has the Garhwal versus Kumaon debate returned within his own Congress party, but charges of his authoritarian style of functioning, corruption and nepotism are also not helping. Congress leaders now rue not dissolving Assembly soon after the apex court judgement, which had reinstated Rawat. His aides, too, concede they had discussed the idea, but were dissuaded by Congress legislators who did not want their five-year term to be cut short.
With campaigning entering a decisive phase, it appears that sympathy for the CM has largely dissipated. Divisions within the Uttarakhand unit of Congress are not helping, either.
Government employees and ex-servicemen, the bulk of the voter population in the hill state, are criticising him for not meeting their demands. Riding on the Army’s surgical strikes across the Line of Control in September and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s move in November to invalidate high-denomination currency notes with the promise of curbing black money and ending corruption, the BJP has returned with a vengeance, as it were.
“The BJP was lagging behind the Congress six months ago but today, it is on par with it,” says political analyst Uma Khant Lakhera.
The BJP is depending on the PM’s charisma through the campaign, pushing its former chief ministers — Bhagat Singh Koshiyari, BC Khanduri and Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank — to the background.
The Congress is facing also facing the brunt of a Garhwal vs Kumaon debate, an ages-old battle for supremacy, and of cultural superiority. Rawat and several of his senior cabinet ministers belong to Kumaon, while party leaders from Garhwal allege their region is poorly represented in the government.
BJP did receive a shot in the arm with former Pradesh Congress Committee president Yashpal Arya joining the part. Apart from him, his son Sanjeev Arya and former party legislator from Yamunotri Kedar Singh Rawat, also joined BJP. Arya, a six-term MLA, has reportedly been upset with the CM’s functioning.
Much before Arya’s exit, however, the Congress had been rocked by desertions to the BJP, with the first lot led by former chief minister Vijay Bahuguna in May last year and the latest being ageing leader ND Tiwari. In between, Rita Bahuguna Joshi also abandoned the party.
Rawat had wanted to be chief minister as far back as 2002, but the party high command parachuted Vijay Bahuguna in for that role. His ambition was finally fulfilled in 2014. But since then he has run the state Congress with an iron fist. Since its inception at the turn of the century, the politics of Uttarakhand has been dominated more by personalities, and less by issues.
While the BJP also faces the problem of having four former chief ministers in its fold, including former Congressman Bahuguna, the incumbent CM finds himself fighting the charisma of PM Modi, a mountain he could find much harder to climb, than the state BJP leaders.
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