Himachal Pradesh: After Singhvi's shock RS loss, Sukhu govt on the brink

What should have been an easy Rajya Sabha election for the ruling Congress party to win in Himachal Pradesh ended in a disastrous defeat, the long shadow of which now haunts the stability of the party’s only state government north of the Vindhyas.

Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu's predecessor and BJP leader, Jairam Thakur, was quick to claim that the Rajya Sabha poll result showed that the chief minister "no longer enjoys support of his party MLAs" and that the "Congress government in Himachal is now in a minority". Thakur demanded that Sukhu "must resign" while BJP insiders claimed that the "possibility of bringing a no-confidence motion against Sukhu in the ongoing session of the Himachal assembly is being considered".

The keenly contested Rajya Sabha poll that had pitted Congress’s Abhishek Manu Singhvi against BJP nominee and former Himachal Congress veteran Harsh Mahajan ended, on Tuesday (February 27), with both candidates polling 34 votes each of the state’s 68 legislators. Singhvi, however, lost the poll in a draw of lots to break the tie.

Singhvi's message to BJP

The shock of the unexpected defeat was evident in Singhvi’s remarks after declaring the poll result. “I want to tell the BJP – introspect. When a party, in a 25:43 equation (referring to the BJP’s 25 MLAs against 43 of the Congress) fields a candidate against the party that has 43 MLAs, it sends only one message. The message is that we will do shamelessly what the law doesn’t allow. If you think one, two or nine people can change their ideology overnight, then you are living in a fool’s paradise. This change is unfortunate for the country and especially for the people of Himachal, who until now were isolated from such political culture. If this is your definition of a New India, I would prefer my old India,” Singhvi told reporters in Shimla.

The Congress foremost legal brain, who ironically has been the party’s lawyer in countless cases challenging defection and cross-voting by MLAs but now stands felled electorally to the same practice, however, did try to take heart from the fact that his defeat wasn’t a one-sided affair. “Despite all their (the BJP’s) efforts to break (MLAs), they could not break away one more and (both candidates) polled 34 against 34. This is, perhaps, for the first time in history that both candidates polled equal number of votes,” Singhvi said.

Singhvi can take comfort in the fact that ultimately, it was fate and not entirely the BJP that vanquished him in the Rajya Sabha poll, given that he eventually lost in a draw of lots. The Congress and Sukhu, in particular, however, may not have the same luxury of seeing a silver lining in the betrayal of the six-party MLAs or those independent legislators who had, until now, unilaterally supported the state government.

Lax on part of Congress High Command?

Congress insiders told The Federal that what went down in Shimla, on Tuesday, had been a long time coming and could have, perhaps, been averted had “the Congress high command in Delhi been more vigilant about the growing disaffection against Sukhu within the legislative party” and the CM “more accommodating” towards “those he saw as a rival camp”.

Asserting that the “situation could have been averted had the high command been more pro-active”, a senior Himachal Congress leader said, “warnings that such a thing may happen had been given to the leadership in Delhi not once but several times but to no avail”.

Sukhu on a sticky wicket?

That Sukhu wasn’t comfortably placed as CM was known almost immediately after the party chose him to lead its flock of 40 legislators upon registering its rare electoral victory over the BJP in the 2022 assembly polls. In the intra-party chief ministerial race, Sukhu was pitted against state Congress unit chief Pratibha Singh, the widow of former chief minister and party stalwart Virbhadra Singh when the Congress won Himachal.

The leadership ultimately chose Sukhu for a combination of factors. Sukhu’s credentials as a grassroots leader with humble beginnings who had risen up the party’s ranks from student politics and the fact that unlike Pratibha and the late Virbhadra, he came from lower Himachal, a BJP bastion where the Congress wanted to consolidate its position ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, Congress sources said, had settled the CM’s post in his favour. Incidentally, Haroli MLA Mukesh Agnihotri, who the party chose as Sukhu’s deputy, also comes from lower Himachal – in fact, the CM’s assembly segment of Nadaun and Agnihotri’s Haroli seat both fall under the same Lok Sabha constituency of Hamirpur, the stronghold of Union minister Anurag Thakur.

Also, Pratibha was the party’s sitting MP from Mandi and the central leadership was not in favour of precipitating a parliamentary and assembly by-election by appointing her CM. Most importantly, though, party insiders say it was Sukhu’s proximity to former party president Rahul Gandhi and party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who had supervised the party’s Himachal assembly poll campaign, which helped him elbow Pratibha out of the race.

Though the Congress leadership had tried to keep Pratibha in good humour after picking Sukhu, Congress sources had spoken about the trust deficit between the CM and the Rani Sahiba (as Pratibha is popularly called). In the run-up to the Rajya Sabha polls, Pratibha had publicly alluded to the rising dissatisfaction within a section of the party against Sukhu’s working style on more than one occasion.

Pratibha’s role in the cross-voting of six party MLA’s in Tuesday’s election is likely to be talked up in the coming days by those close to Sukhu. Interestingly though, throughout Tuesday’s polling, Pratibha and her son, Himachal minister Vikramaditya Singh, made sure that they said nothing that could be construed by the Sukhu camp as a sign of fanning rebellion. On the contrary, Pratibha, while admitting that there were “challenges” in the election and some MLAs were “unhappy”, told reporters in Shimla that the party was “doing everything” to address such grievances.

'No point in blaming Pratibha'

Himachal Congress leaders The Federal spoke to asserted that “there was no point in blaming Pratibha or anyone else, including the BJP, nor in claiming that had we fielded a Himachali candidate instead of an outsider like Singhvi, the results would be in our favour”. “Sukhu brought this upon himself but things can still be rectified if the high command takes corrective measures and either replaces Sukhu or forces him to change his working style,” a senior minister in Sukhu’s cabinet said. Another party MLA, however, claimed that the “BJP has tasted blood and now it won’t give up till it topples the government; the time for making amends is long past”.

For Sukhu, an added challenge would be to explain to the central leadership, who he had assured of an easy win for Singhvi, how he had failed to even keep MLAs from his own region of Una-Hamirpur within the Congress camp. Rajinder Rana, Inderdutt Lakhanpal, Chaitanya Sharma, Davinder Bhutto, four of the six Congress MLAs who cross-voted in the election – the other two are Ravi Thakur and Sudhir Sharma – represent constituencies in the Hamirpur and Una districts, which are also the districts within which the assembly segments of Sukhu and Agnihotri fall, respectively.

A Himachal Congress leader, close to one of the MLAs who cross-voted, claimed these legislators had assured the party’s central and state leadership that their grievance was “not with the party but with the CM” and that they “do not wish to de-stabilise the government”.

“The grievance is with the CM and his unilateral working style. If the party changes the CM or he changes his working style and shows respect to other leaders, things can still be improved before the Lok Sabha polls but if even now no lessons are learnt, the government will not survive. Every CM in Himachal, including Virbhadra Singh and Prem Kumar Dhumal (of the BJP) had the political maturity to listen to leaders of different factions of their parties and from different parts of the state and address their concerns but Sukhu lacks this tact... the party high command has given him a free hand in Himachal and he has used it to sideline anyone who doesn’t blindly follow him; ultimately the party has to choose whether it wants to a strong Congress or a CM who thinks he is strong but has no support of his own MLAs,” the leader quoted above added.