Himachal votes today: BJP faces uphill task, Congress banks on Priyanka

Himachal Pradesh is all set to vote for an election keenly contested by the ruling BJP and its principal rival, the Congress party, to wrest control of the hill state’s 68-member Assembly. The state, with an electorate of over 55 lakh voters, will vote today (November 12) though the election outcome will only be known nearly a month later – on December 8, along with results for the ensuing Gujarat Assembly polls.

The hill state had given a comfortable 44-seat victory to the BJP in 2017, while the Congress, after five years in power, had been reduced to a 21-seat tally. The election outcome of 2017 was a reaffirmation of Himachal’s decades-old electoral trend of voting out an incumbent government every five years.

Ever since Himachal was granted full statehood in 1971, this trend has been broken only once – in 1985, when the Congress had returned to power for a second consecutive term after then Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh forced a mid-term election within three years of the party’s 1982 victory.

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Though one will have to wait till December 8 to know if the BJP succeeds in breaking the cyclical pattern of Himachal’s electoral mandates, a sentiment of anti-incumbency, coupled with public anger over growing unemployment, rising prices and poor policy prescriptions, has been palpable against CM Jairam Thakur’s government.

BJP’s woes

Adding to the woes of the BJP are nearly two dozen rebels from within its ranks who have entered the poll arena in different constituencies against the official party candidate. The saffron party was left red-faced last week when a video of former Rajya Sabha MP Kirpal Parmar’s purported telephonic conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi went viral. Parmar was denied a ticket by the BJP and is now contesting as an independent candidate from the Fatehpur constituency. In the video, Parmar is reportedly speaking to Modi who can be heard telling the former to withdraw from the contest.

Since the video went viral, Parmar has given countless interviews to local and national media outlets venting ire against BJP national president JP Nadda, who hails from Himachal. The BJP has also been beset with rebel trouble in Nadda’s own home district of Bilaspur.

Also read: Himachal polls: We work 365 days, 24X7; take every poll seriously, says Nadda

It is the public’s resentment against the state government and dissension within the BJP’s ranks that the Congress party, starved for electoral victories across the country, is banking heavily on to bounce back to power.

Prestige issue for Priyanka

With Priyanka Gandhi Vadra unofficially steering the party’s campaign, the Congress has made a litany of populist poll promises, including 300 units of free electricity, replacing the currently applicable National Pension Scheme for government employees with the Old Pension Scheme and ordering recruitment for 1 lakh vacancies in government jobs at the very first meeting of the cabinet if the party comes to power.

The election is also a prestige issue for Priyanka, who has a residence in Charabra, on the outskirts of the state capital Shimla, and has spent the last several months working out nuances of the Congress’s election campaign even as her mother, Sonia Gandhi, stepped down as Congress president and her brother, Rahul Gandhi, stayed away from the campaign due to his prior commitment in the ongoing Bharat Jodo Yatra.

Also read: Big jolt for Cong in Himachal as 26 leaders join BJP before assembly polls

Priyanka’s last outing as a Congress poll manager was a spectacular failure. She had led the party’s poll campaign for Uttar Pradesh earlier this year but despite her aggressive canvassing and novel ideas of reserving 40 per cent tickets for women candidates and a spirited outreach to the state’s electorally crucial Dalit and backward class community, the Congress registered an all-time low tally of just two out of UP’s 403 assembly seats.

With the Himachal election, Priyanka is hoping to redeem her widely perceived image of being the more astute and pragmatic Gandhi sibling.

Uphill task for BJP

The BJP, which has uncharacteristically been on the backfoot during the campaign, is still banking on the Modi factor and its stale ‘double-engine ki sarkar’ pitch to win the state. However, party insiders admit that retaining power is an uphill task given the circumstances that the BJP finds itself in at the moment.

Off-the-record conversations with BJP leaders in the hill state suggest growing uneasiness within the party against Jairam Thakur’s tenure as CM and his projection as the CM face for the upcoming polls, as well as the raging factional feuds between loyalists of Thakur, Union minister Anurag Thakur and even JP Nadda.

A Himachal BJP leader considered close to Anurag Thakur told The Federal, “Thakur has been a complete failure and we should have replaced him a year ago when the BJP lost the Lok Sabha bypoll for Mandi (Thakur’s home turf) and three other Assembly by-elections. He has neither been able to build a vote base for himself beyond Mandi nor has he bothered to take other leaders along.”

Further, he added, “The BJP in Himachal was known for giving CMs (Prem Kumar Dhumal and Shanta Kumar), who were both good administrators as well as leaders with a mass base. Thakur was practically gifted the chief ministership in 2017 because Dhumal (then the BJP’s CM-face) lost the election but in the last five years he has proved to be a complete disaster and if we lose, it will be purely his responsibility.”

There are others in the party who believe Thakur will be an easy scapegoat in the event of the BJP’s defeat even though the problems troubling the party in the state are a result of multiple factors, including economic policies of the Centre as well as tensions within the party organisation for which Nadda and Anurag Thakur are equally to blame.

Watch: Can Congress ride anti-incumbency wave to sweep Himachal Pradesh?

“If we lose, obviously everyone will blame Jairam as he is the CM and CM face but fact is that we are facing public anger on issues like unemployment, the Agnipath scheme, the new National Pension Scheme and high prices of fuel and LPG cylinders. All these issues have been created because of policies of the central government but then we can’t blame Modi. Likewise, the rebel problem has been created by Nadda and Anurag Thakur because they never wanted Jairam to emerge as a strong leader,” pointed out a BJP candidate from a constituency in Mandi district to The Federal.

Congress revival

The Congress had begun to show signs of revival last year when it swept the Lok Sabha and Assembly bypolls. Though leaders from both BJP and the Congress had then attributed the bypoll wins to sympathy for the Congress due to the demise of Virbhadra Singh, a former six-term CM and one of Himachal’s tallest leaders – Virbhadra’s wife, Pratibha Singh had won the Mandi Lok Sabha bypoll and is currently the state Congress chief – there were clear signs even then of unemployment and anger against the BJP among the state’s apple growers developing into major poll issues.

The Congress in Himachal has always been a divided house with multiple chief ministerial aspirants. The BJP had hoped that this running internal feud between Congress factions led by Pratibha Singh, Anand Sharma, Sukhwinder Sukhu and some others along with the Aam Aadmi Party’s foray into Himachal politics would ultimately grant the saffron party a clear electoral edge.

However, the Congress seems to have finally realised the importance of prioritising an election victory over settling internal feuds. It went into elections without projecting any CM candidate; asserting repeatedly on the merit of collective leadership, and ensured that barring stray incidents of infighting over candidate selection and unnecessary veiled attacks by Pratibha Singh against her intra-party rivals, the campaign largely stayed on point.

Priyanka addressed nearly half a dozen rallies over the past month and, on the last day of campaigning conducted door-to-door canvassing in Shimla, while nudging all 68 party candidates to simultaneously carry out ‘Vijay Ashirwad’ rallies in their respective constituencies.

The AAP gives up

The AAP, which had started with some promise of making electoral in-roads into Himachal earlier this year after it swept the Assembly polls in neighbouring Punjab in March, seems to have given up midway on its ambition of winning the hill state. Though Kejriwal did address some well-attended rallies in the state, the party’s campaign never really took off while several of its state-unit leaders defected to the BJP or the Congress.