CM aspirants on shaky ground, kin of former ones too

With votes being cast for the Uttarakhand assembly polls on February 14, the fate of candidates in the fray will be sealed till March 10, when the results are scheduled to be announced. However, as contenders across party lines begin their nearly month-long wait to know if their hectic campaign in the hill state has yielded the desired results, there will also be on test two electoral theories that have come to define Uttarakhand in the 22 years of its existence.

First, of course, is the perception of the state voting out the incumbent ruling party every five years. The second, albeit less talked about, is the jinx that nearly all Uttarakhand chief ministers of the past have faced at the hustings come polling season – no sitting chief minister, with the exception BJP’s Bhagat Singh Koshyari, has ever won re-election in the state.

The present election, however, adds another interesting facet to Uttarakhand’s poll story. Not only is sitting chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami caught in a keen contest against his Congress rival, Bhuvan Kapri, in Udham Singh Nagar district’s Khatima constituency but other chief minister hopefuls in the fray – Congress’s Harish Rawat in Lalkuan and the Aam Aadmi Party’s Ajay Kothiyal in Gangotri – too aren’t looking at a comfortable victory.

In fact, the jinx seems to have extended to high-profile dynasts too with former chief minister Harish Rawat’s daughter Anupama Rawat facing a tough electoral battle in Haridwar Rural against incumbent BJP MLA and minister Swami Yatishwaranand and BJP’s Ritu Khanduri largely tipped to lose her re-election bid from the Kotdwar constituency to the Congress’s Surendra Singh Negi, the man who had defeated her father and then sitting chief minister, BC Khanduri, from this seat in 2012.

Similarly, Congress candidate Sumit Hridayesh who is contesting his first assembly election from Haldwani, a seat won by his mother, late Indira Hridayesh, in 2002, 2012 and 2017, is in for a close fight with the BJP’s Jogendra Pal Singh Rautela while Sanjeev Arya, son of Uttarakhand’s most popular Dalit leader and Bajpur MLA Yashpal Arya, is caught in a triangular contest in his sitting seat of Nainital against BJP’s Sarita Arya and the AAP’s Hem Arya.

Dhami had won the 2017 elections, his second consecutive win from here, by a narrow margin of just 2,709 votes against Kapri. The BJP high command’s surprise pick for chief minister when the party decided to suddenly sack Tirath Singh Rawat last July, Dhami has used the past few months of his chief ministerial stint to consolidate his position in Khatima through a series of populist announcements.

However, there is palpable anti-incumbency in the constituency against him just as it is against the BJP in the rest of the state. “He has been our MLA for two terms now, but most of the promises he made are yet to be fulfilled. Over the last few months, he has been travelling across the constituency saying he has put things in motion… some things have happened since he became chief minister; we got two proper schools, an Army canteen and a honey factory… he says if people here vote for him again, he will ensure all pending works are completed because he will continue to be the chief minister when the BJP returns to power,” Jaipal Singh, a Khatima resident, told The Federal.

“Bhuvan Kapri has been working in Khatima for the past 10 years and he is raising the right issues of lack of health infrastructure, illegal mining, land mafia and farmer unrest. It is difficult to say who will win but this isn’t a cakewalk for Dhami; if he wins, it will be because people here think he will remain chief minister… he has put up hoardings all over Khatima claiming he has Narendra Modi’s blessings,” Singh added.

For Dhami, the demography of Khatima is also proving to be an electoral challenge. The constituency has a fair number of Muslims, who are traditional Congress voters, and pockets of Sikhs, mostly engaged in agricultural activity, who are upset with the BJP since last year’s farmer protests. This aside, Khatima has a huge concentration of Tharu tribals and some Bhoksa tribals – both communities are reportedly unhappy with the BJP owing to disputes over land ownership rights and have publicly endorsed Kapri in this election. Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s canvassing for Kapri on February 12, the last day of campaigning in Uttarakhand, too has made the contest a difficult one for Dhami to win, say Khatima residents.

If the sitting chief minister is having a tough time retaining his seat, chief ministerial-aspirant Harish Rawat, who had lost the 2017 polls, when he was in Dhami’s chair, from both seats – Kichha and Haridwar Rural – he had contested, is finding his re-election bid from Nainital district’s Lalkuan constituency a daunting task. It is public knowledge in Uttarakhand that Harish was not in contention from the Lalkuan seat and wanted to contest the polls from Ramnagar constituency in the same district.

The Congress had, in fact, declared Harish’s candidature from Ramnagar on January 24 but revolt from within the party, particularly from Harish’s protégé-turned-foe Ranjit Rawat, forced a change in his seat within 48 hours and he was sent to Lalkuan after the party asked its candidate from the seat, Sandhya Dalakoti, to step down.

“It is ironical that Harish Rawat is considered the tallest Congress leader in Uttarakhand but in the past five years since he lost the polls and pledged to return with a bigger mandate for himself and his party, he was not able to develop a constituency for himself. He had a better chance of winning from Dharchula or even Didihat (both constituencies in Pithoragarh district) but for reasons best known to him and the Congress, he is contesting from Lalkuan where the BJP candidate, Mohan Bisht, is very popular. Dalakoti, who was forced to make way for Harish Rawat, had been nursing Lalkuan for the past five years and there have been rumours of her supporters working against Harish in this election,” Nainital-based journalist Ravindra Devliyal told The Federal.

The Haridwar Rural seat is witnessing a close contest between Anupama Rawat and BJP’s Swami Yatishwaranand. In the 2017 polls, Yatishwaranand had defeated Harish from this seat and Anupama has been campaigning across the constituency seeking to avenge her father’s electoral humiliation. The Haridwar Rural seat, however, has a substantial Dalit vote base, that has traditionally gone to the BSP, along with a strong presence of Muslim voters. The Hindu-Muslim polarisation triggered by the BJP in Haridwar, particularly after the Haridwar Dharam Sansad episode, had already made the electoral challenge tough for Anupama. Last week, Anupama faced another setback when, in a surprise move, the Samajwadi Party candidate here, Sajid Ansari, publicly appealed to his supporters to vote for the BSP candidate, Dr Yunus Ansari.

Several senior Congress leaders, including Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi, have appealed for votes for Anupama while Harish too has made several rounds of the constituency making emotional appeals to voters to elect his daughter. However, none of these seem to have worked to turn the tide decisively in Anupama’s favour.

“It is a very close contest. Anupama has been working in Haridwar for seven years; she is very active in the social circle and is accessible to everyone, but the BJP has become strong here due to Hindu-Muslim polarisation… the BSP-SP collaboration will certainly harm her prospects as she will lose a chunk of Dalit and Muslim votes, which were key to her victory,” Ramesh Shukla, a resident of Maharana Pratap Colony in the constituency, told The Federal.

The case of Ritu Khanduri, daughter of former chief minister BC Khanduri, and BJP candidate from Kotdwar is even more interesting. Ritu had won the 2017 assembly polls from the adjoining Yamkeshwar seat while the Kotdwar seat was won by BJP’s Harak Singh Rawat, who returned to the Congress (Harak had defected to the BJP in 2016) just last month. Harak Singh, who has won every assembly poll he has contested in Uttarakhand since its creation in 2000 – and from different constituencies across the Garhwal region, continues to have significant sway in Kotdwar.

BJP insiders say Ritu was moved from Yamkeshwar to Kotdwar due to “internal surveys that showed her losing from Yamkeshwar”. However, a close aide of the BJP candidate told The Federal that the party had “sent her to Kotdwar to lose just like it did in 2012 when her father was fielded from here.”

Also read: Jittered by anti-incumbency, BJP plays Hindu-Muslim card to retain ‘Devbhoomi’

Like Anupama, Ritu too invokes her father’s “love for the people of Kotdwar” while campaigning and tells them that they made a mistake by voting for Congress’s Surendra Singh Negi in 2012 and “opportunist, turncoat” Harak Singh Rawat in 2017. Negi, a Congress stalwart and five term MLA (he won two terms from Lansdowne when Uttar Pradesh hadn’t been bifurcated and thrice, including a bypoll, from Kotdwar) had defeated Ritu’s father from Kotdwar in 2012 in an election that many believe, to this day, was sabotaged by BJP members close to Koshyari, an intra-party rival of BC Khanduri.

“Unlike her father, Ritu has no appeal in Kotdwar. She would have lost Yamkeshwar and she will lose Kotdwar too. Negi is a good man, he does a lot of work and is very humble. In any case, there is a lot of unhappiness in Kotdwar against the BJP because the party did not do anything for us in the past five years… there is overwhelming support for Negi here and he will defeat Ritu by an even bigger margin than the one he had over BC Khanduri,” Rajiv Nautiyal, a Kotdwar voter told The Federal.