No end in sight to Congress’ woes in Himachal Pradesh ahead of Lok Sabha polls

With just over two months to go before the four Lok Sabha constituencies of Himachal Pradesh go for polls along with the by-election for six assembly segments, the Congress is fighting a desperate battle on multiple fronts in the hill state.

The grand old party’s woes in the only north Indian state where it currently holds power have continued to pile up ever since it failed to secure what was supposed to be a comfortable win for its nominee, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, in the February 27 Rajya Sabha polls. Singhvi’s shock defeat following cross-voting in favour of BJP candidate Harsh Mahajan by six Congress legislators and three independent MLAs who, until then were supporting the party’s government, had threatened to dislodge Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu from the chief minister’s chair.

To pre-empt the BJP from toppling the state government at the time, Himachal Assembly Speaker Kuldeep Singh Pathania had acted swiftly to rule in favour of a Congress plea to disqualify the six party rebels – Sudhir Sharma, Rajinder Rana, Inder Dutt Lakhanpal, Chaitanya Sharma, Ravi Thakur and Davinder Bhutto – as MLAs. The party’s internal crisis, however, continued to snowball as its state unit chief Pratibha Singh, widow of Congress stalwart and former six-term Himachal CM late Virbhadra Singh, and her minister son Vikramaditya Singh began publicly hitting out at Sukhu’s style of functioning.

Challenge not over

Caught snoozing in the run up to the crisis, the Congress high command belatedly tried to contain the damage by placating Pratibha and Vikramaditya with the setting up of a committee to ensure better coordination between the government and the party organisation. That the Supreme Court showed no urgency to hear the petitions moved by the six party rebels challenging their disqualification from the state assembly also gave some comfort to the Sukhu government.

Over the past week, however, the challenges for Sukhu and the party have begun to escalate once again even as the Congress high command struggles to finalise candidates for the state’s four Lok Sabha seats and six assembly constituencies that fell vacant with the disqualification of the rebels. Voting for these 10 seats is scheduled to take place simultaneously, on June 1, the last phase of the Lok Sabha elections.

Sources say there is also a possibility that the Election Commission may notify three additional assembly bypolls in the state soon since the independent legislators who had voted for Mahajan in the Rajya Sabha polls resigned from the state assembly earlier this week. On Saturday (March 23), the six Congress rebels and the three independent MLAs – KL Thakur (Nalagarh), Hoshyar Singh (Dehra) and Ashish Sharma (Hamirpur) – joined the BJP amid indications that the saffron party is likely to field all of them as its nominees in the assembly bypolls.

With the strength of the Himachal assembly down from 68 to 59 MLAs following the disqualification of the rebels and the resignation of the three independent legislators, the Congress’s presently tally of 34 members (including the Speaker) against the BJP’s 25 may seem like a comfortable majority. Congress leaders, however, are aware that this arithmetic could change drastically once the Lok Sabha and assembly bypolls conclude.

Finding new faces

While the BJP has its candidates for the assembly bypolls already lined up since the Congress rebels who joined it on Saturday are expected to be fielded again, the grand old party has the ominous task of finding new faces in each of these assembly segments. Of the six rebels, Sudhir Sharma, Rajinder Rana, ID Lakhanpal and Ravi Thakur, have all been MLAs for two or three terms and Congress sources concede that finding candidates who can match not just their electoral clout but also the BJP’s poll machinery in the bypolls will not be easy.

A senior Congress leader from the state told The Federal finding “winning candidates” for the assembly bypolls is, however, a lesser problem for the party as of now. “The bigger challenge is how to ensure we don’t lose more MLAs over the next couple of months… things are not good in the party and even the CM knows that even if he refuses to admit this,” the veteran leader said.

There are already clear signs that the truce, which the Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had hoped to strike between Sukhu and Pratibha by setting up the six-member coordination committee, hasn’t worked as intended. Pratibha stung her party’s central leadership earlier this week by going public with her refusal to contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls from Mandi, the seat she had won in a 2021 bypoll.

Party chief sulks

The Himachal Congress president, still sulking at having lost the chief ministerial race to Sukhu two years ago, however, didn’t stop at saying no to the Lok Sabha contest. She also made it known that she was bowing out of the race because “circumstances were not ripe” for a Congress victory at the hustings. Pratibha has asked the central leadership to field veteran party leader Kaul Singh Thakur from Mandi, instead, and said that she would rather “focus on strengthening the party’s prospects in the assembly bypolls so that we can save our state government”.

Pratibha isn’t the only senior party leader who has refused to contest the Lok Sabha polls. Sources said the party’s Himachal in-charge, Rajeev Shukla, and other leaders had urged Ram Lal Thakur, former Congress MLA from Sri Naina Devi, to take on Union minister Anurag Thakur in the latter’s family stronghold of Hamirpur but were emphatically turned down.

“I am not interested in contesting the Lok Sabha polls, the party had also fielded me in 2019 against my wishes and I lost…. I don’t want a repeat of that result…. Besides, the CM and deputy CM (Mukesh Agnihotri) are both MLAs from assembly segments that fall in Hamirpur parliamentary seat; why don’t either of them contest against Anurag Thakur if they are so serious about winning the seat… they are popular leaders and have a better chance of defeating BJP; I even lost the assembly polls, even though very narrowly, in 2022,” Ram Lal Thakur told The Federal.

Weighing options?

Leaders from the Sukhu camp claim that Pratibha’s refusal to contest the Lok Sabha polls has nothing to do with her preoccupation with the bypoll preparations.

“She and her son are weighing their options. Everyone knows they haven’t been able to accept Sukhu as CM and they just want to wait for the right time to strike against him. The moment we lost the Rajya Sabha polls, the mother and son immediately started criticising the CM… if the BJP had managed to topple our government, I am sure they would have defected to the BJP and taken their loyalist MLAs with them… I think Rani sahiba (as Pratibha is popularly called in the state) is waiting to see how the assembly bypolls pan out; if the BJP manages to win most of the bypoll seats, she will take her son and other loyalists to the BJP to ensure Sukhu’s government falls,” a senior member of the Sukhu cabinet said.

Pratibha, of course, dismissed these allegations and dubbed them “motivated statements by some of our colleagues who have vested interests”. “Our whole family has always been with the Congress and we believe in the ideology of the party. I have never said everything is fine in the party and both I and Vikramaditya have, from time to time, raised our concerns for the betterment of the party… as PCC president, it is my duty to tell our government as well as our high command the areas where we need to work better and I have been doing that but if some people want to twist that and give some other meaning to it, I cannot say anything on it. We have a tough election ahead and I, as PCC chief, am fully involved in preparing the party for that which is the only reason why I do not want to contest from Mandi,” Pratibha told The Federal.

Schemes yet to take off

The Congress is expected to finalise its Lok Sabha and assembly bypoll candidates for Himachal after Holi. The party had hoped that following the Rajya Sabha setback, Sukhu would expedite clearing populist schemes for the state which the Congress had promised as its guarantees during the 2022 assembly polls. With the model code of conduct for elections coming into force, however, several Sukhu’s announcements made earlier this month couldn’t take off the files.

The party leadership is wary of the damage that this might do to its victory prospects at a time when it is barely holding on to its government in the state and desperately trying to ward off another round of rebellion. The BJP, meanwhile, is predictably shoring up its strength; confident that two months from now it will steal the mandate from its arch rival in yet another state.