<br>Also as the principal Opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is aggressively grilling the government on its policies ranging from closing 920 offices and institutions, comprising schools and colleges, to political vendetta to the appointment of Chief Parliamentary Secretaries, which it says is a drain on the exchequer and against ruling by courts.
However, the confident saffron brigade aims to retain all four parliamentary seats — Mandi, Hamirpur, Kangra and Shimla — with record margins as it was in 2019 when it was contested under the leadership of first-time Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur, who is currently the Leader of Opposition.
In election results last December, the Congress got an absolute majority by winning 40 seats, six seats more than the half-way mark of 34 in the 68-member House, reducing the outgoing BJP legislators from 44 to 25 seats.
With the Congress securing 43.90 per cent vote share, the gap is of less than one per cent between both traditional archrivals.
“The government is vindictive. The Chief Minister took oath on December 11 and on the very next day he took a decision to de-notify over 900 institutions opened by the previous government,” Jai Ram Thakur told IANS, adding “the governments kept changing in the past but no regime has acted with political vendetta like this.”<br>Contrary to the Opposition’s charges, a confident Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, on completing 100 days of helm on March 21, said the government has fulfilled five of the 10 poll guarantees, including restoring the Old pension Scheme that will benefit 1.36 lakh employees.
In this brief stint, there is no allegation of corruption against the government.
In fact, the government dissolved the Himachal Pradesh Staff Selection Commission after taking into consideration charges levelled in the inquiry reports indicating involvement of many officials from top to bottom in the paper leaks scams and other irregularities in the past three years.
The commission had become the hub of corruption selling jobs and depriving the meritorious candidates, he added.
On his first decision to de-notify government institutions, Sukhu said these institutions were opened with no staff or budgetary provision.
However, an optimistic former Cabinet minister and BJP leader Suresh Bhardwaj told IANS that the party will win all four seats of Himachal Pradesh in 2024.
“The BJP is strong in Himachal Pradesh. In recent polls, our vote share is equal to the Congress despite the unfavourable results. Otherwise, any Opposition party in Himachal used to get less than 40 per cent votes. As far as 2024 polls are concerned, the BJP will fight it under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi,” he said.
Regarding the party leadership, four-time legislator Bhardwaj, 70, who lost the Assembly polls as he was shifted to new battleground Kasumpti from his stronghold Shimla (Urban) at the last minute, said in Himachal there “is no leadership issue as our party believes in an organisation-driven campaign”.
“As far as issues are concerned, the present Cong government has lost its credibility so soon. Now they are backtracking on the poll promises, withdrawing and denotifying schemes and institutions started by our government to facilitate people.
“The Congress lied to the people of the state, made false promises. It does not have any issue and is busy in saving the Gandhi family only. The BJP is going to the people not only in Himachal but across the country.”
“Policies of our government-led by PM Modi and the anti-people policies of the state government will be the main issues in Himachal in the 2024 polls,” Bhardwaj told IANS.
The saffron party had won 44 of the 68 Assembly seats in 2017 with a vote share of 48.8 per cent, up from 38.47 per cent in 2012.
In December 2022, the Congress dislodged the BJP in Himachal, which maintained its tradition of voting the incumbent government out of power since 1985, by just 37,974 votes. The difference in the vote share between the two parties was a mere 0.9 per cent.
In the 2019 Parliamentary polls, the state’s ruling BJP retained all the four Lok Sabha seats as its candidates won by a record margin.
Hamirpur sitting MP Anurag Thakur, Kangra candidate Kishan Kapoor, Shimla candidate Suresh Kashyap and Mandi sitting MP Ram Swaroop Sharma won their seats by defeating their nearest Congress rivals.
For former chief of the national cricket bodies Anurag Thakur that was the fourth consecutive victory. He won by over 3.81 lakh votes against Congress legislator Ram Lal Thakur.
From Kangra, the largest Lok Sabha constituency in the state in terms of voters, BJP’s Kishan Kapoor won by a margin of more than 4.47 lakh votes.
In the Shimla (reserved) seat, Suresh Kashyap, now the state unit party chief, won by over 3.23 lakh votes, sitting MP Ram Swaroop Sharma, now dead, won the seat by a margin of more than 3.63 lakh votes.
A total of 38,01,793 voters — 72.25 per cent of 52,62,126 eligible ones — exercised their franchise on May 19, 2019, in a single phase to select their representatives to the 17th Lok Sabha.
Forty-five candidates, including a lone woman, were in the fray from the four seats.
With the electorate in the Lok Sabha polls traditionally favouring the party at the helm in the state, the 2019 elections were seen as a referendum on the state’s 17-month-old Jai Ram Thakur government.
(Vishal Gulati can be contacted at gulatiians@gmail.com)
–IANS<br>vg/shb/
