The Narendra Modi wave seems to have swept across Uttarakhand also, as the Congress was decimated on Saturday by the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2017 Assembly elections. Outgoing Chief Minister Harish Rawat faced a defeat in both the seats he contested from. The results show that the anti-incumbency trend has continued in the state.
By choosing to contest from Kichha and Haridwar Rural, and ditching his constituency Dharchula, Rawat had attempted to address the obvious divide between the Kumaon and Garhwal regions. Rawat himself is from the Kumaon region and was being ambitious when he decided to set foot on Garhwal too. The incumbent chief minister ended up losing not just Garhwal, but Kumaon too.
Harish Rawat’s daughter Anupama Rawat has been an active worker in the Haridwar Rural area and has taken up several farmer-related and other matters in the region. Most of her work was focused in the Muslim-Dalit belt that is formed in the faraway villages of Haridwar Rural, including villages such as Dhanpura and Padartha, where she is very popular. Naturally, the villagers believed she would be fielded from the area. Instead her father chose to contest there.
The BJP had fielded Swami Yatishwaranand from Haridwar Rural constituency. Harish Rawat lost to Yatishwaranand by over 12,000 votes. Rawat managed to get only 32,686 votes, while Yatishwaranand, who is also the sitting MLA from the region, won 44,964 votes.
Kichha has a large number of Muslim voters, which the outgoing chief minister was expected to benefit from. Sitting MLA Rajesh Shukla was fielded in Kichha by the BJP to take on Harish Rawat. In the 2012 Assembly elections, Shukla had won defeating Congress’ SY Khan by a margin of only 8,000 votes. Harish Rawat lost these polls to Shukla by a thin margin of 2,127 votes. Shukla won 40,363 votes, while Rawat got a close 38,236 votes.
Rawat resigned as chief minister on Saturday afternoon.
Harish Rawat, who took over from Vijay Bahuguna as the chief minister in 2014, has had a difficult tenure. In March 2016, a group of Congress MLAs led by Bahuguna, had defected from the party and joined hands with the BJP. After the Centre had imposed President’s rule in the state, a floor test was conducted which Harish Rawat eventually won. However, the chief minister had also found himself in the middle of a controversy when the BJP released a “sting operation” video claiming it showed Harish Rawat engaging in horse trading of legislators ahead of the trust vote.
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