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Journalism of Courage
For Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, the bypoll results on Saturday come as a huge relief as they have cemented his control over the ruling Congress party in the state.
Himachal politics hit turbulence in February after six Congress MLAs voted in favour of the BJP’s Harsh Mahajan in the Rajya Sabha elections. They were later disqualified from the Assembly after the Congress’s Rajya Sabha candidate Abhishek Singhvi lost the poll. This also reduced the party’s tally to 34 in the 68-member House, when the majority mark was 35.
Then, questions were raised whether the Congress government could survive, as reports of dissension and factionalism within the state party unit surfaced. Sukhu, however, got a breather in June, when the Congress won four out of six seats in the bypolls, which were vacated due to the disqualification of the rebel MLAs who joined the BJP.
The July 10 bypolls to three other seats — Dehra, Hamirpur and Nalagarh — whose results were announced Saturday, were necessitated because of the resignations of Independent MLAs from these seats. They also joined the BJP.
Sukhu aimed to clinch these three seats to further consolidate the position of the Congress dispensation led by him. On the other hand, the BJP also went all out in the bypolls, hoping that its victory would put the Sukhu government on shaky ground again.
The bypoll outcome saw the Congress winning from the Dehra and Nalagarh seats while losing Hamirpur with a slender margin. This also took the Congress’s tally to 40 seats – the party’s original position that it had achieved after clinching the 2022 Assembly polls.
The Dehra win is especially significant for Sukhu as it is a seat the Congress has never won. Hoping to reverse this, Sukhu’s wife Kamlesh Thakur made her election debut from the seat and won with 9,399 votes against the BJP’s Hoshyar Singh Chambyal. In her poll campaign, she had pledged that Dehra would get a CM office in the event of her win.
In Nalagarh, the Congress’s Hardeep Singh Bawa won, defeating BJP candidate KL Thakur with a margin of 8,990 votes. Bawa has also become a first time MLA.
Hamirpur saw the most fierce battle among the three seats. The Hamirpur parliamentary seat — under which Dehra also falls —- is represented by senior BJP leader Anurag Thakur. Even during the campaigning, Anurag’s
focus on the seat was apparent: he practically camped in his constituency for days for it.
While the BJP’s Ashish Sharma managed to win Hamirpur against the Congress’s Pushpendra Verma, his victory margin is just 1,571 votes.
There are talks in the Congress circles now that the bypoll results have reinforced Sukhu’s dominance in the government as well as the party.
“CM Sukhu has emerged stronger by the outcome of these by-elections. His stature was enhanced when Congress had won four by-elections out of six in June. Two more wins now make his grip tighter on the party affairs. The people of Himachal Pradesh have rejected the policies of the BJP.”
Rajeev Bindal, the state BJP president, however, alleged: “The results of bypolls are the outcome of the threatening tactics of CM Sukhu and his government. Sukhu’s government is rooted in deep corruption. Despite all odds, the BJP won Hamirpur.”
