Of 9 Himachal MLAs who rebelled against CM Sukhu in Rajya Sabha election, 6 end up losing Assembly membership

The Newz Radar Network

Six of the nine MLAs, six from the Congress and three Independent, who had voted for BJP candidate Harsh Mahajan in the February 27 Rajya Sabha poll for the lone seat from Himachal Pradesh now stare at an uncertain future.
All of them lost the byelections from their respective seats that they had contested on the BJP ticket after either being expelled from the Assembly or having resigned on their own.
Of the six former Congress MLAs who had rebelled against their party and supported Mahajan, only Sudhir Sharma (Dharamshala) and Inder Dutt Lakhanpal (Barsar) emerged victorious in the June 1 Assembly byelections that were conducted alongside the Lok Sabha poll. The remaining four — Rajinder Rana (Sujanpur), Chaitanya Sharma (Gagret), Ravi Thakur (Lahaul-Spiti) and Davinder Kumar Bhutto (Kutlehar) — had to taste defeat. All the six were expelled from the Vidhan Sabha by Speaker Kuldeep Pathania on February 29 for disregarding a party whip on voting during the budget session.
After the Rajya Sabha election that saw the defeat of senior Congress leader and top legal luminary Abhishek Manu Singhvi at the hands of Harsh Mahajan, the six Congress rebels were herded off by the BJP in resorts in party-ruled Haryana and Uttarakhand for a month. They subsequently returned home and formally joined the BJP despite resistance by local leaders. All six were nominated by the BJP as candidates in the byelections from their respective seats.
The three Independent MLAs — KL Thakur (Nalagarh), Ashish Sharma (Hamirpur) and Hoshyar Singh (Dehra) — who too had voted for Mahajan had resigned on their own from the Assembly. However, the Speaker delayed acceptance of their resignations, resulting which the bypolls to their seats couldn’t be conducted alongside the Lok Sabha elections, something they had desired. The byelections were finally held on July 10 and results declared on July 13. Only Ashish Sharma was able to retain his seat while KL Thakur and Hoshyar Singh lost, the main factor being dissent in the BJP cadre over their entry into the party.
All the six losing BJP candidates of the nine now face the double whammy of not only losing their Vidhan Sabha membership, but also whether or not the saffron party would renominate them from their respective seats in the next Assembly elections.