Chandigarh: In a sign of increasing troubles for the ruling Congress in Himachal Pradesh, six disqualified party rebel MLAs officially joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Saturday (March 23).
It is learnt that the Congress tried to lure them but could not avert their switch to the BJP.
Along with them, three independent MLAs, who resigned from their post on Friday (March 22) in the presence of BJP leaders, too, joined the party, thereby cementing the saffron party’s position ahead of the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.
The BJP’s game plan appears to be very simple. With these MLAs joining the saffron party, the BJP isn’t just aiming for a major victory in all four Lok Sabha seats of the state; it also intends to shake up the already precarious Congress government led by Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu.
Apart from election in four Lok Sabha constituencies, Himachal Pradesh will witness bypolls in all these nine assembly constituencies, which were previously occupied by independents and rebel MLAs.
It seems that the BJP will be working tirelessly to ensure it retains all these nine assembly seats, possibly by fielding the same leaders again on the saffron symbol. If this happens, it will be a death knell for the Sukhu government.
In the 68-member assembly constituency, the ruling Congress was in a comfortable majority with the support of 43 MLAs – 40 of its own and three independents, after it won the 2022 assembly polls. The remaining 25 MLAs were from the BJP.
The Gandhi family then selected their loyalist Sukhwinder Sukhu as the new Himachal Pradesh chief minister, ignoring the claims of the late Congress stalwart Virbhadra’s family.
As it turned out, Sukhu could not keep former Virbhadra loyalists in good humour, leading to their revolt against his government and thereby weakening its position.
Currently, the Congress doesn’t have more than 34 MLAs on its side, just on the fence of the majority mark (35) in the state assembly.
This makes it crucial for the Sukhu government to perform well in the bypolls.
In the event of a complete rout, the BJP will match the current number of MLAs held by the Congress.
Poll observers suggest that this would pose an extreme risk to the survival of the Sukhu government and could potentially trigger its downfall, especially considering the ongoing infighting within the ruling camp.
Rajya Sabha polls
All was well with the Sukhu government until the recent Rajya Sabha polls. The Congress fielded senior party leader and advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi as it thought that it had enough numbers to win the polls.
However, six Congress MLAs – Rajinder Singh Rana, Sudhir Sharma, Chaitanya Sharma, Ravi Thakur, Inder Dutt Lakhanpal and Davinder Bhutto – cross-voted in the Rajya Sabha election in favour of BJP candidate Harsh Mahajan.
Three Independents – Hoshyar Singh, Ashish Sharma and K.L. Thakur – also left the Sukhu camp for the BJP, leading to Singhvi’s defeat.
Since then, the situation has been precarious for the Congress. The party is not in a comfortable position as it was once after the 2022 assembly polls.
Sukhu’s leadership, it appears, failed to control the inner conflict within the party, reportedly aired by the late Virbhadra family and their old loyalists.
All is still not well within the party. Pratibha Singh, the state’s Congress chief and the wife of the late Virbhadra, refused to fight from the Mandi parliamentary seat she currently holds. She cited the need for the party to focus on the constituencies previously held by party rebels.
This, many believe, further aired the difference between Sukhu and Pratibha in public, even as the Congress high command had formed a high-level coordination committee to bridge their differences.
