BJP holds unsteady upper hand in U’khand

Sandeep Dixit

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, February 12

The story of 2014 elections in the Hindi heartland where the BJP swept the board went according to the script in Uttarakhand as well. The BJP handsomely won all the five seats in Uttarakhand, most of them by margins of about one lakh votes, considered decisive and substantial in hill states with low population density.

In Uttarakhand, the script for a Congress washout was written a couple of years earlier when two of its winners of the 2009 Lok Sabha elections crossed over to the BJP. Both enjoyed popular support —Vijay Bahuguna was a former Congress CM who nearly pulled down his party colleague Harish Rawat’s government till the Supreme Court set matters right. The other, Satpal Maharaj, is a seer-politician and considered influential in part of Garhwal.

The seeds of trouble were sown because in 2012, the Congress had stitched a government with the help of defections and Independents. A barely-surviving government was ripe for destablisation and the advent of Modi at the Centre accelerated the exodus from the Congress.

There have been murmurs about the ability of the current BJP government, with a rock-solid majority, to deliver on the promises. But the gloss eroded with allegations of influence peddling by the Chief Minister’s family. The spin on good governance came unstuck after the hooch tragedy that claimed 80 lives, many of them in Dalit villages of Hardwar. This could spell trouble for the BJP, especially in view of the SP-BSP alliance in neighbouring UP. While the BJP and the Congress have intermittently won the Hardwar seat, the SP-BSP have emerged runners-up in seven out of the last eight Lok Sabha elections.

Of the other two seats in Garhwal region — where the BJP had a strike rate of over 90 per cent in the Assembly elections — the BJP seems to sit pretty in Tehri after inveigling the royal family to its side. The crossing over of Vijay Bahuguna who had defeated the former King twice has helped the BJP politically consolidate its position. The third seat, Garhwal, might remain with the BJP, especially because the two candidates who won the seat seven out of last eight times are in the same party.

If odds favour the BJP in two of the three Garhwal seats with an upper hand so far in Hardwar, the recent civic polls have been an eye-opener. The two Lok Sabha seats in Kumaon do not look invincible anymore. In Kumaon, the BJP bagged the Mayor’s post only in one large town—Pithoragarh—and lost Almora, Nainital and Haldwani to the Congress besides several other towns to Independents. In all, the BJP won only 34 out of 84 Mayor posts and the Congress was not too far behind at 25. Of the 1,000-odd wards, the BJP won less than one-third. The default option however was not the Congress but Independents who picked up half the seats.

If the trend sustains, the Congress is in with a clear chance on two seats but remains the underdog on the remaining three Uttarakhand seats.