TNR Desk
The six disqualified Himachal Pradesh Congress MLAs are all set to the join the BJP in New Delhi on Saturday (March 23, 2024) along with the Independent MLAs KL Thakur (Nalagarh), Ashish Sharma (Hamirpur) and Hoshyar Singh (Dehra) who resigned from the Assembly in Shimla on Friday.
The development came over three weeks after all the nine MLAs had cross-voted for the BJP’s candidate in the February 27 Rajya Sabha election for the lone seat from the state.
Sources said the BJP had agreed to the demand of the six disqualified MLAs and the three Independents to field them from the constituencies where byelections had been necessitated following their disqualification and resignation from the Vidhan Sabha.
The six MLAs — Sudhir Sharma (Dharamshala), Rajinder Rana (Sujanpur), Ravi Thakur (Lahaul-Spiti), Inder Dutt Lakhanpal (Barsar), Chaitanya Sharma (Gagret) and Davinder Bhutto (Kutlehar) — are learnt to have met BJP president JP Nadda in New Delhi last evening. The six rebels MLAs were accompanied by the three Independent legislators.
After the cross-voting, the six Congress rebels and the three Independent MLAs have not visited their home and have been camping outside Himachal under the protection of CRPF personnel. They were first holed up in a hotel in BJP-ruled Panchkula, then in Rishikesh and now in Gurugram.
TNR had earlier reported that the MLAs were set to join the BJP anytime soon, but their condition of the announcement of the BJP ticket from the constituencies they were defending at the time of their joining the saffron party had held up the process.
Ticket ‘promise’ to Hoshyar wasn’t kept
In seeking ticket at the time of joining the BJP, the six Congress rebels cited the example of Independent MLA from Dehra in Kangra district, Hoshyar Singh, who had joined the BJP in the presence of party president JP Nadda in Shimla before the 2022 Assembly elections.
Hoshyar Singh, however, was denied the ticket. He then contested as an Independent against BJP candidate Ravinder Singh Ravi, a loyalist of former Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal, and defeated him by a margin of 3,877 votes.
Following the announcement of byelections in the six Assembly constituencies of Himachal Pradesh alongside the Lok Sabha elections, the entire focus has shifted to what the BJP’s strategy would be on the choice of candidates.
The party had pulled off a major coup in the Rajya Sabha election to the lone seat on February 27 when, despite having 25 MLAs, it beat the ruling Congress that had 40 legislators.
The question being widely debated in Himachal politics is whether the BJP will grant the tickets to all the six Congress rebels who had cross-voted for the BJP in the Rajya Sabha election and whose disqualification from the Assembly has necessitated the byelections. But by doing so, the saffron party is bound to trigger dissent within the party ranks, particularly in seats where the victory margin in the 2022 Assembly elections was narrow.
2 ex-ministers in contention
In tribal Lahaul-Spiti constituency, the 1,616-vote victory margin of disqualified Congress MLA Ravi Thakur over BJP’s Ram Lal Markanda wasn’t too high. Markanda was a minister in the previous BJP government led by Jai Ram Thakur and has strong connections in the party.
In Kutlehar (Hamirpur), Davinder Kumar Bhutto of the Congress had defeated BJP’s Virender Kanwar by 7,579 votes. Virender too is a powerful BJP leader and remained a minister during the Jai Ram government. He is currently the party’s state vice-president.
