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Journalism of Courage
Initiating the review of the party’s poor performance in Himachal Pradesh in the Lok Sabha elections, a two-member All India Congress Committee (AICC) team on Monday interacted with ministers and legislators from the Mandi and Hamirpur parliamentary constituencies. The Congress failed to win any of the four Lok Sabha seats in the hill state for the third straight time. It also lost Mandi, the seat that state Congress chief Pratibha Singh had won in a bypoll.
The two-member committee comprising Rajya Sabha MP Rajni Patil and former MP P L Punia met Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, Deputy CM Mukesh Agnihotri, Pratibha Singh, as well as party candidates Vikramaditya Singh (Mandi), Satpal Raizada (Hamirpur) and other leaders from the two constituencies. The meetings for the constituencies of Kangra and Shimla will be held on Tuesday.
Before attending the meeting, Sukhu said, “We did lose all four parliamentary seats for a second time, but our vote share increased by 14 percentage points. However, in elections, it is the victory that matters and we have to take lessons from these results.” The Congress’s vote share rose from 27.3% to 41.67% while the BJP’s dropped from 69.11% to 56.44%.
Asked about the delay in naming the candidates, Sukhu said, “We announced the candidates’ names as per the party’s strategy and timely decided all the candidates except for Hamirpur, Satpal Raizada.” The CM, however, accepted that there was a delay in finalising the names for Hamirpur and Shimla.
Several leaders who held a one-on-one interaction with Patil and Punia told them that the Congress’s organising committee did not get the full support of the state government in some of the parliamentary constituencies. Sources privy to the developments told The Indian Express that some leaders told the AICC team that Sukhu was more focused on the by-elections to the six Assembly seats and not the parliamentary elections.
Bypolls to the six Assembly seats — necessitated after the Assembly Speaker disqualified as many Congress MLAs for not following the party whip during the Rajya Sbaha elections in February — and the parliamentary elections were held together on June 1. The Congress retained four of the six Assembly seats even as it failed to open its account in the Lok Sabha polls.
A senior Congress leader said, “Congress had bright chances of retaining Mandi from where the party had fielded PWD Minister Vikramaditya Singh against the BJP’s Kangna Ranaut. Party chief and then sitting MP Pratibha Singh had been insisting for a long time to announce the names of candidates, particularly for Mandi. But Vikramaditya’s name was decided very late. Moreover, Pratibha Singh had said several times that BJP was much ahead in preparing for the parliamentary elections, but she was not taken seriously.”
Ranaut, contesting her debut election, won Mandi with a margin of 74,755 votes. Former Union Minister Anurag Thakur won the Hamirpur seat for the consecutive fifth time, defeating Raizada by 1,82,357 votes. Former Union Minister Anand Sharma, who too contested his debut parliamentary election, lost to the BJP’s Dr Rajeev Bhardwaj with a margin of 2.51 lakh votes in Kangra. Vinod Sultanpuri of the Congress lost from the Shimla (SC-reserved) seat to the BJP’s Suresh Kumar Kashyap by 90,548 votes.
Of the 68 Assembly segments in the state, BJP candidates led in 61, including in Sukhu’s Assembly constituency Nadaun in Hamirpur. The Congress led only in Kullu, Ani, Lahaul Spiti, Kinnaur, Jubbal Kotkhai, Rohru, and Haroli.
