By all accounts, the restoration of the Congress-led Harish Rawat government in Uttarakhand in May this year, after a legal intervention, led to low spirits in the BJP ranks, but party president Amit Shah has decided it is time the party snapped out of it. The State is due for Assembly elections next year.
At a meeting of BJP State unit’s core committee in Delhi on Monday, Mr. Shah told party leaders in no uncertain terms that they needed to come up with a winning strategy.
A senior party office-bearer, who was present, told The Hindu that Mr. Shah was worried that Chief Minister Harish Rawat had managed to garner much public sympathy over large-scale desertions in his legislative ranks early last year. Nine MLAs of the Congress left the party to join the BJP. “The party president said the BJP needed to counter this campaign, since Mr. Rawat, according to him, was not only getting sympathy for being ‘betrayed’ by colleagues but had ‘conveniently’ put the blame of three sting operations against him that allegedly showed him offering bribes for support as part of a political vendetta against him by the BJP,” he said.
Mr. Rawat has lodged cases against all nine Congress MLAs who quit the Congress party to join the BJP after a rebellion.
Programmes lined up“For a start, we will be making preparations for a Parivartan Yatra , and other programmes organised by the Scheduled Caste cell of the party. Dates for the programmes are being finalised,” an office-bearer said.
On whether the BJP will project a chief ministerial face in the next Assembly elections, a senior leader said the matter had been kept in abeyance for now.
“Our problem in Uttarakhand is that we have four former Chief Ministers in the reckoning — B. C. Khanduri, Bhagat Singh Koshiyari, Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’, and Vijay Bahuguna, who had been the chief minister of the Congress-led government in the past, before Mr. Rawat replaced him,” the source said.
