The Election Commission on Wednesday announced dates for the Uttarakhand Assembly elections, with all the 71 seats in the state set to go to the polls in a single phase on February 15. Counting for the entire state will be conducted on March 11.

Uttarakhand

Phases: 1

Voting day: February 15

Counting day: March 11

To say 2016 was a roller-coaster of a year in Uttarakhand is to put it mildly. The hill state saw a down-to-the-wire Rajya Sabha seat battle, forest fires, the politicised death of a police horse and a constitutional crisis that saw President’s Rule briefly put in place before the judiciary intervened and had it removed.

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At the end of all of that, things nominally stand at the same place that they did before 2016: The Congress is in charge of Uttarakhand, with Chief Minister Harish Rawat running the scene.

Uttarakhand has swung back and forth between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress ever since it was carved out in 2000, and it seemed as if the same was set to happen in this year’s polls, as unhappiness with the alleged corruption of the Rawat government began building up.

But the BJP’s impatience, attempting to grab five Opposition Members of Legislative Authority, backfired, as the judiciary intervened to reinstate the Congress government. The judicial vindication came as a shot in the arm for the Congress, which was worried that the Uttarakhand example might endanger its razor-thin-margin governments elsewhere, and at the very least put the two parties on a level playing field.

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Much has happened since then, with more squabbling within and between the parties, and plenty of corruption charges being bandied about. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on a visit to the state, talked about alleged corruption that took place during the flood relief efforts in 2013, without seeming to realise that the chief minister back then, Vijay Bahuguna, had since defected to the BJP and was sitting on the same dais as him.

Where Uttarakhand goes from here is impossible to predict. What might have been a straight forward, anti-incumbent swing back to the BJP has now been complicated by the President’s Rule and subsequent reversal last year. Yet Rawat is by no means on stable ground, and his state unit has been unable to shed the tag of corruption that the BJP has frequently attacked him on. The chief minister has also squabbled with his own state unit head, although that is nothing compared to the infighting within the BJP where there are now at least four former chief ministers and two more hopefuls.

For more background on the state:

  • Namaz break for Uttarakhand employees: It’s back to Muslim tokenism for the Congress, writes Shoaib Daniyal.
  • Six months after a hero’s comeback, Harish Rawat has lost his sheen. And polls are round the corner, writes Anita Katyal.