Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Dec 10: Amidst high drama and intense politicking, the Congress high command on Saturday named the four time party MLA Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu, who headed the party’s election campaign machinery during the just-concluded Assembly elections, as the new chief minister of Himachal Pradesh with Mukesh Agnihotri as his deputy.
Soon after the High command sounded its preference, the Himachal Congress legislature party met in Shimla and elected Mr Sukhu as the leader to take over as the chief minister of the hill state.
Mr Sukhu, 58, an MLA from Nadaun in Hamirpur district, and Mr Agnihotri, who was the leader of the opposition in the outgoing Assembly, will be sworn-in as the chief and the deputy chief ministers respectively at 11 A.M. on Sunday, Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel who along with former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda were the AICC observers at the CLP meeting, said.
The decision came a day after the newly elected Congress MLAs passed a resolution authorising the Congress high command to select the next leader of the legislature party following intense lobbying by at least four claimants for the top job including Mr Sukhu, Mr Agnihotri and the incumbent state Congress president Pratibha Singh, who was considered to be the frontrunner given that she was the wife of the tallest Congress leader in the hill state, Virbhadra Singh, who died last year.
On Friday, the factionalism within the State unit of the party came to the forefront as a high drama was witnessed ahead of a meeting of party legislators in Shimla to choose the chief minister. The meeting saw multiple delays. Also, chaotic scenes were witnessed at the Congress office in Shimla, after supporters of the party’s State president Pratibha Singh shouted slogans, demanding that she be named as the Chief Minister.
Though 18 of the 40 newly-elected Congress MLAs supported Pratibha Singh’s candidature, she did not find favour from the high command apparently because she was currently an MP from Mandi and most of the newly-elected members, including some of her supporters, were of the opinion that the chief minister should be from amongst the MLAs. “We accept the decision taken by the Congress high command,” Pratibha Singh told the media after the names were announced.
“We will run a very good government. Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi, and Mallikarjun Kharge will attend the oath ceremony tomorrow,” Hooda said.
On Friday night, Pratibha Singh’s supporters and the Sukhu camp had held a show of strength in front of the party observers at Rajeev Bhawan, the Congress headquarters.
But Sukhu later claimed that he never campaigned for the top job. “I was never in any race for any post and would not be in future. I am a Congress party worker. I never had longing for any post,” he said. He said when he was a student when the Congress made him state president of the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) and later, the chief of party State Youth Congress. “Party has given me so much and to follow the party’s order is my duty,” he said.
The political observers believe that by rejecting the claims of Pratibha Singh, who staked her claim on the ground that she was the wife of the deceased chief minister, the high command many be trying to give a message that family was not all that mattered, since the Congress always faced the criticism that it held family criteria above the grass-t level workers. At the national level, the Congress apparently has an image problem of being the same old-same old. It has struggled to make a generational change in other states. The small state of Himachal, only the third it now rules, can thus be used for a big message: That the Congress is not shy of disruptive change, and family isn’t all that matters.
Mr Sukhu, a former president of the Himachal Pradesh Congress, is also a four-time MLA and is considered close to party leader Rahul Gandhi. Vastly different in origin from the ex-royal Virbhadra Singh, Mr Sukhu, as an activist at Himachal Pradesh University in Shimla, led the National Students’ Union of India’s state unit in the late 1980s.
Earlier on Saturday evening after it came to be known that Pratibha Singh will not be the Chief Minister, her supporters protested at the hotel where the party’s central observers were staying. Pratibha Singh had staked her claim to the job with a sharp reminder for the leadership in Delhi. She said the elections were fought and won in the name of Virbhadra Singh and it would be “a disaster” to sideline his family.
Mr Sukhu is a lawyer by profession and emerged through the ranks from the NSUI. Graduating to a full-time political career, he was president of the state Youth Congress in the 2000s. He was replaced as state unit chief in 2019 by Kuldeep Rathore reportedly in a compromise against factionalism.
Of the 40 Congress MLAs in the House of 68, Sukhwinder Sukhu has support of more than half. For four decades, he has worked at almost all levels of the party in Himachal. Rising from the National Student Union of India (NSUI) to Youth Congress to the state unit chief. He made claims to the top seat, and made no secret of his rivalry with Virbhadra Singh. This style made him stand out in a sea of leaders who, without a squeak, played second fiddle to the “Raja” Virbhadra Singh.
Sukhwinder Sukhu is among early members of Team Rahul. He is also young by political standards; at 58, around a decade younger than Pratibha Singh, 66. Choosing a worker-turned-leader over royal inheritors sits well with the Congress’s revived message of working at the grassroots — a key theme of Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra.’
