Ashutosh Bhardwaj 
Mandi/Shimla (Himachal Pradesh): Himachal Pradesh is a curious study of history, geography and politics.
In Chini tehsil of Mandi constituency, independent India registered its first vote, in a small hamlet inhabited by Buddhists who owed their allegiance to the Panchen Lama in Tibet. While the entire country voted for the first Lok Sabha in early 1952, the Election Commission ensured voting in Chini in October 1951 because the area remained out of bound due to snow in the winters. And in the snowy desert of Spiti Valley is situated India’s highest polling booth, Tashigang, with just 52 registered voters.
The student movement
The state’s student politics also show a complex pattern. Himachal has had a vibrant Left students’ movement, but this hasn’t translated into electoral success. For several decades, members of the Students Federation of India (SFI, the students’ wing of the CPI(M)), successfully countered the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP, students’ wing of the RSS) in the state, but they somehow vanish after graduating from the university, leaving electoral politics to the two bigger parties.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Where do the SFI activists vanish?
Former BJP chief minister Jairam Thakur once told this correspondent, “Communists are able to appeal for a brief period, but most people with communist backgrounds, when they enter politics, join the Congress. We also find that even while they (the SFI-affiliated youth) are studying in colleges and universities, instead of voting for their candidate, they vote for the Congress.”
Talking to The Wire, Shimla’s former deputy mayor Tikender Panwar explains the phenomenon.
“Himachal Pradesh has had a high-pitch Left students’ union movement. You won’t find such a pan-state Left student movement except in a few states like Kerala and West Bengal,” says Panwar, underlining that somehow it hasn’t translated into a commensurate political movement.
“In Kerala, for instance, bright Left student leaders entered politics and became ministers. In Himachal, the bright students were absorbed by the market,” says Panwar, himself a CPI(M) leader.
Not that these students surrendered their progressive consciousness, but in the absence of a political space they shifted elsewhere.
One reason was Himachal’s first chief minister and Congress leader Y.S. Parmar, who aggressively pushed for land reforms and several other agenda items from the Left manifesto, and reduced the space for Left politics.
“Y.S. Parmar was a Communist in disguise. He introduced land reforms, and articulated several concerns better than many Communists in Himachal. I think after Kerala and J&K, Himachal land reforms stand among the best in the country,” Panwar says.
If land reforms gave the peasantry their rights, farming of cash crops like apples and other exotic vegetables made them rich. You won’t easily find a Himachali working in apple orchards; the task is completely outsourced to Nepalese or residents of other Indian states. Added to this is a thriving tourism sector that opened avenues for locals even in distant places.
“There is no working class in Himachal, only service class,” says Panwar.
A BJP rally in Shimla. Photo: Ashutosh Bhardwaj
One can gauge the social matrix by the fact that the Scheduled Castes are fairly prosperous here, when compared to other Hindi-speaking states. A small pocket of Scheduled Tribes in the remote land of Lahaul has had a tradition of sending IAS officers across the country.
For women too, the state offers more freedom than most. Female participation in political rallies is high; their voices are significant. And that’s why the Congress campaign against actor Kangana Ranaut, the BJP candidate from the Mandi seat, stands out.
Addressing a large election rally in Mandi district, former Congress MLA Bambar Thakur chooses the choicest words for Ranaut.
“She is a blot on womanhood. She can’t be our sister (Yah nari shakti ke naam par dhabba hai. Ham ise bahan nahin kah sakte),” he says, takes a pause and begins again. “She says that she’s a girl. A girl is one who is not married. But she herself has said (in the past) that in whatever film I act, I have to live like a wife with the movie’s hero…not only with the hero, but also with the director (Kahti hai ki main ladki hun. Ladki wah hoti hai jiski shadi nahi hui hoti. Yah to kahti hai ki jis bhi film ke andar jaati hun, wahan par jo hero hota hai uske sath mujhe wife ke taur par rahna padta hai…hero ke sath hi nahin, director ke sath bhi).”
The Congress has promised to scrap the Agnipath scheme and demanded a new Himachal regiment in the Army for the scores of youths who join armed forces every year. The party may find a resonance among voters because as many as 46,960 currently serving soldiers are from Himachal Pradesh. The state has only 0.57% of the national population, but is responsible for 4% of the army’s strength, with 4,202 and 5,882 selections in the last two regular recruitment cycles of 2018-19 and 2019-20 respectively before the Agnipath scheme was launched. But the Congress has failed on one of its most important promises – respect for women. Because whatever absurd statements Ranaut may have made during her campaign, she should not have been met with Congress leaders assaulting her character because she “smokes” or doesn’t follow their prescribed code of conduct.
The politics
And thus, a meagre four Lok Sabha seats find an equal number of heavyweights. Late chief minister Virbhadra Singh’s son Vikramaditya Singh is contesting against Ranaut from Mandi, a seat his family has won as many as six times in the past. Union minister Anurag Thakur is the BJP candidate in Hamirpur, while former Union minister Anand Sharma is the Congress’s nominee in Kangra. It’s also the home state of BJP president J.P. Nadda, whose unspoken rivalry with Anurag Thakur has been a subject of discussions.
But June 1 is not about the four seats alone. Himachal Pradesh is also voting for the six assembly seats that fell vacant after six Congress MLAs were disqualified for cross-voting in the Rajya Sabha elections earlier this year. The BJP quickly inducted all of them and gave tickets from the same constituencies they had won in the 2022 assembly polls. The candidates are Rajinder Rana (Sujanpur), Sudhir Sharma (Dharamshala), Ravi Thakur (Lhaul-Spiti), Inder Dutt Lakhanpal (Barsar), Devinder Kumar Bhutto (Kutlehar) and Chaitanya Sharma (Gagret).
How does the by-poll impact the state’s politics? In an assembly of 68 seats, the Congress has 34 MLAs. If it gets just one of the six seats, it gets the full majority. But if the BJP wins all the six, its current tally of 25 will be increased to 31, exposing the independents and some Congress legislators to defections.
But the bigger concern is the social climate of Himachal, perhaps the only state the BJP has not been able to vitiate along communal lines, a card they have mastered in the neighbouring Uttarakhand.
If one reason is the strong Left students’ movement that successfully countered the ABVP-BJP for decades, the another is the innate religiosity and non-intrusiveness of the mountain culture that sees temples of local deities and goddesses even on non-frequented forested trails. This reporter once found an Urdu Ramacharitmanas in a Buddhist household near Sissu in Lahaul, part of the Mandi Lok Sabha constituency.
However, the students’ movement is on a decline following the prohibition on union elections in the colleges and universities of Himachal a decade ago. “We no longer get the best students as we once did,” CPI(M) leaders say. “Once we were present in almost all the colleges of the state, but no longer now.”
There are also renewed attempts to create saffron spaces.
As she incessantly spoke a language of Hindutva and underlined her identity as a “Modi bhakt”, Ranaut gave a new legitimacy to a discourse few embrace in the hills.
Some of the BJP’s schemes have few takers here. “We have been receiving free ration since Virbhadra’s rule,” says Chint Ram, a retired government employee in Mandi. He adds that the Congress promise during the 2022 polls to revive the old pension scheme, considered to be a major reason for the party’s victory, should also find resonance in the Lok Sabha polls in a state that is dominated by government employees.
The state has more than 1.60 lakh government employees and an equal number of pensioners.
In the 2022 assembly polls, Himachal defied pollster Prashant Kishor’s prediction about the “Congress rout”. Few know the magnitude of his error. It was instead a “BJP rout”, as the party lost eight of its 11 sitting ministers, and a ninth who fielded his son in place of himself also lost the seat.
The defeat arrived even as the Congress was in its usual disarray against the BJP’s mammoth machinery. Following the death of Virbhadra Singh, the Congress fought without a chief ministerial face, without a strong unified leadership, and oscillated among three major camps – PCC president Pratibha Singh, former PCC president Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu and the Leader of Opposition Mukesh Agnihotri. And yet, the state rejected saffron politics.
The significance of June 4 for Himachal can’t be overestimated.