In narrow Himachal win, Congress cannot afford to celebrate yet

On a day it suffered its worst ever poll drubbing in Gujarat, the Congress party could draw some solace from its slender victory over the BJP in the Himachal Pradesh assembly election. The tiny hill state continued its tradition of voting out an incumbent government every five years despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s extensive campaign and fervent appeal to the electorate to vote “for me, not the candidate”.

Desperate for a reversal of its long-plummeting electoral fortunes, the Congress finally got a win in Himachal. However, the Congress leadership may not want to uncork the bubbly just yet. Despite a 40 seat victory in the 68-member state assembly, the Grand Old Party will need to constantly guard its flock against expected attempts by the BJP to poach its newly-elected lawmakers.

The Congress, say sources, is already planning to move its newly-elected MLAs to a resort in Chandigarh – or even Raipur or Jaipur, while its leadership, particularly Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, navigates the tricky maze of government formation and consensus-building over who to name as Himachal’s new chief minister. Naming the CM is not expected to be an easy choice for the factionalism-ridden Congress.

Rivals Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu and Mukesh Agnihotri, who both retained their Nadaun and Haroli assembly seats, on Thursday (December 8), are vying for the CM’s throne, while Vikramaditya Singh, son of the late Virbhadra Singh and MLA from Shimla Rural, has made it clear that his mother, Himachal Congress chief and Lok Sabha MP from Mandi, Pratibha Singh, is also a contender for the post despite not contesting the recent polls.

Also read: After UP debacle, Himachal outcome tastes as sweet success for Priyanka Gandhi

Two other CM aspirants, party veterans Kaul Singh Thakur and Asha Kumari have now been edged out of the race as they lost the election from the Darang and Dalhousie constituencies, respectively. Notably, Thakur lost by a narrow margin of just 618 votes, while Kumari, a six-term MLA, who had hoped to become Himachal’s first woman CM, suffered a surprise defeat in her pocket borough of Dalhousie, which she lost to the BJP’s Dhavinder Singh by 9,918 votes.

The BJP, largely tipped to lose Himachal due to palpable anti-incumbency against outgoing Chief Minister Jairam Thakur’s government, could win only 25 seats. Predictably, the blame for the BJP’s defeat, say sources, is now being laid at Thakur’s doorstep even though much of the bad blood caused within the party over ticket distribution was equally because of the conflicting choices of BJP national president JP Nadda (Himachal is his home state) and Union minister Anurag Thakur.

Modi, of course, is beyond any blame in the BJP’s scheme of things even when he seeks votes in his name and fails.

The silver lining for the saffron party was in the robust vote share of 42.99 per cent it recorded against the Congress’s 43.91 per cent and the fact that the three independent candidates who won from Dehra, Nalagarh and Hamirpur seats were its own men who had gone rogue after being denied a ticket.

BJP sources told The Federal that party leaders, including Thakur, who won his Seraj seat comfortably with a margin of nearly 40,000 votes, began reaching out to the three independent lawmakers. If the three return to the party’s fold, the BJP’s tally would go up to 28 MLAs, just seven short of the simple majority mark of 35 seats in the assembly. Such an eventuality would put the Congress on notice as any dissensions within its legislative party would predictably be exploited by the BJP to engineer defections.

Also read: BJP can go to any level, need to protect Himachal’s Cong MLAs from poaching bid: Bhupesh Baghel

The Congress’s election campaign managers had hoped that massive anti-incumbency against the Thakur-led government, coupled with visible public anger against the BJP on issues of rising prices, crippling unemployment, pro-corporate sector reforms in the state’s apple economy and the Centre’s Agnipath scheme would collectively propel the GOP to an absolute majority.

Priyanka, smarting under the humiliation she suffered earlier this year when her efforts to revive the Congress electorally in Uttar Pradesh failed miserably in the state’s Assembly polls, had immersed herself in her party’s poll preparations for Himachal. Sources say she had personally reached out to Pratibha Singh, Sukhu, Agnihotri and other warring satraps to broker an uneasy truce and was also instrumental in getting several rebel Congress candidates to withdraw from the contest.

A senior Congress MLA who managed to win his seat by a slender margin told The Federal, “While we are happy that we won Himachal, the scale of the victory is not as per our expectations. We had hoped to cross 45 seats as this would have given us some cushion against any attempts by the BJP to destabilise our government. I think we raised the right issues and ran a fairly good campaign but our inability to project a CM face due to infighting and then some statements made by Pratibha Singh and Sukhu during the course of the campaign damaged our prospects.”

Further, the Congress MLA warned, “Now, we will have to be very vigilant…the ride ahead will not be smooth.”

Through the course of the campaign, Pratibha had repeatedly invoked her late husband, Virbhadra Singh, a former six-term chief minister of Himachal, and insisted that the Congress cannot ignore his legacy. Sukhu, a long-time bitter rival of Virbhadra, had been equally caustic in his remarks against the late Raja of Rampur-Bushahr. In several interviews, Sukhu repeatedly accused Virbhadra of fomenting factional feuds in a bid to secure his own centrality to the Congress in Himachal.

A Congress veteran, who narrowly lost the election told The Federal, “it is not the Congress that has won this election but the BJP that lost it… we can give some credit to Priyanka for keeping things under check but the fact is that Pratibha Singh and Sukhu were working at cross-purposes throughout the campaign and that damaged us on many seats; had anti-incumbency against the BJP not been so severe, we would have lost this election the way we have lost Gujarat.”

Also read: Congress wins Himachal polls as state continues anti-incumbency tradition

This leader added that a blessing in disguise for the Congress was also Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal’s decision to focus the Aam Aadmi Party’s attention on the Gujarat polls instead of Himachal. “Had Kejriwal invested even half of the time and resources AAP put into Gujarat, they could have damaged us a lot, especially in the seats adjoining Punjab. We got lucky because Kejriwal focussed on Gujarat; we may not be this lucky next time,” said the veteran.

The AAP had started off its campaign in Himachal with a bang shortly after it won a landslide victory in Punjab earlier this year. However, within months, the AAP’s expansion plans in Himachal lost steam as Kejriwal got increasingly ambitious about conquering Gujarat. Several AAP leaders, from its Himachal unit chief downwards, subsequently hopped either to the BJP or to the Congress.

Kejriwal’s rallies in Himachal drew impressive crowds, the absence of any notable local leadership and a cohesive campaign derailed the party’s campaign even before it gained momentum.

As results came in on Thursday, the AAP’s rout in Himachal was absolute. The AAP registered an appalling 1.10 per cent vote share and nearly all its 68 candidates lost their deposits; a fact the party tried to conceal by diverting attention to the nearly 13 per cent vote share it garnered in Gujarat – albeit with a dismal tally of five seats in the 182-member Assembly – that has now guaranteed it the status of a national party.

The Congress, which is now accusing the AAP of being in cahoots with the BJP to edge the GOP out of relevance in Gujarat, may want to discreetly send a thank you note to Kejriwal for not purportedly doing the same in Himachal. For now, the Congress needs to wind up its celebrations over the Himachal victory quickly and focus on the immediate challenge of building that evasive consensus over its chief ministerial candidate, while simultaneously isolating its legislative bloc from any poaching attempts by the BJP.

Priyanka has already tasked Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel and former Haryana CM Bhupinder Hooda to keep the newly-elected MLAs ‘safe’ till she hammers out a compromise among the chief ministerial hopefuls. How effectively she tackles this task will be crucial to her personal credibility within the party as she has been known to bet on the wrong horses (case in point: Navjot Singh Sidhu in Punjab) or make promises to her confidantes that she can’t promptly deliver on (such as promising Sachin Pilot the CM chair in Rajasthan).