SHIMLA: Fissures within the Congress government in Himachal Pradesh surfaced once again on Wednesday as state party chief Pratibha Singh on Wednesday refused to re-contest from the Mandi parliamentary seat, saying elections cannot be fought merely by distributing MP discretionary funds and by disappointing party activists.
Pratibha Singh, wife of six-time chief minister late Virbhadra Singh and mother of state Cabinet minister Vikramaditya Singh, reached Shimla from Delhi after attending the screening committee meeting in Delhi on Tuesday.
Without mincing words, she said she would have to give importance to the by-elections to six assembly seats to save the government. “We will work to save the government,” she said, adding, “no active worker is visible who will work for the party”.
Voting for the four Lok Sabha seats -- Kangra, Mandi, Hamirpur and Shimla (reserved), currently held by the BJP, will be held in a single phase on June 1. By-elections to six Assembly seats, all held by the Congress, will be held simultaneously.
The seats -- Dharamsala, Lahaul-Spiti, Sujanpur, Barsar, Gagret and Kutlehar -- fell vacant after the Congress disqualified its sitting MLAs -- Rajinder Rana, Sudhir Sharma, Inder Dutt Lakhanpal, Devinder Kumar Bhutoo, Ravi Thakur, and Chetanya Sharma -- on the ground that they abstained from voting on the Budget, defying the party whip.
Citing reasons for not re-entering the poll fray, Pratibha Singh said, “Had the people I had recommended were given responsibility in time, they would have come out and worked for the party. Today, I do not see any worker who will actively work for the party.”
“I have been out in the field and have seen the ground situation. I don’t think we will be able to achieve much success, so I have decided to withdraw my name,” she explained.
Pratibha Singh, who lost the Mandi seat in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, defeated BJP’s Brigadier Khushal Thakur (retired), a decorated officer who played a crucial role in the 1999 Kargil war, in bypoll in 2021 by a slender margin of 8,766 votes.
The seat fell vacant with the death of two-time BJP MP Ram Swaroop Sharma.
Notwithstanding the drubbing in the 2022 Assembly polls, the BJP leadership in Himachal Pradesh is once again banking largely on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'charisma' in the Lok Sabha polls as it believes that it equals the ruling Congress' vote share in the state.
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 and chairman on board and corporations, which it says is a drain on the exchequer and against ruling by courts.
The BJP aims to retain all four Lok Sabha seats -- Mandi, Hamirpur, Kangra and Shimla -- with record margins as it did in 2019 when the party contested under the leadership of first-time Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur, who is currently the Leader of Opposition.