Foiling the alleged BJP stratagem to engineer cross-voting from the Congress and PDF sides to foist an upset, Pradeep Tamta, the Congress candidate for the Rajya Sabha election, has won, securing six votes more that what the Opposition pulled up.
The win of Tamta would further strengthen the hands of Chief Minister Harish Rawat and weaken the strength of the Opposition BJP vis-à-vis the ruling coalition. Blame game has started in the saffron camp in the immediate aftermath of the Congress win as some BJP insiders say that the party brass has committed a blunder by making Geeta Thakur, a Dalit, to opt out of the race at the final moment on Friday.
Angry over being forced to drop out, Thakur later quit BJP and joined Congress. The development boosted the morale of the Congress as the Dalit appeal with Tamta being a Dalit made the PDF members throw their full weight behind the Congress candidate. In another setback, BJP lost an MlA Dan Singh Bhandari who sprang a shock on his party as he quit BJP in the run-up to the biennial election.
Political analysts said that Congress, besieged with the Garhwal and Kumaon divide, had spent some anxious moments ahead of the RS election with BJP out to use it to wean away a few of the Congress MlAs from Garhwal to its side to upset the Congress applecart. But BJP’s position on the issue of championing the cause of Garhwal was not convincing enough. Interestingly, the leaders of both Congress and BJP-Harish Rawat and Ajay Bhatt-hail from Kumaon division.
BJP had never been sure of its ground since the date of the biennial election was announced. This was evident from the fact that the principal Opposition party failed to throw gauntlet to the ruling coalition directly by fielding an official candidate to take on the latter.
They instead went for the roundabout way to have two independents fielded. This despite the fact that there were embers of discontent smouldering in the Congress and PDF camps over the party brass foisting Pradeep Tamta on them as the candidate. There was a number of aspirants in the Congress eying the seat.
Besides, PDF made bold to announce that it would support the Harish Rawat government in the coming days if the latter came out to support one of its leaders for the RS election. Even the PDF projected the State Cabinet minister Dinesh Dhanai as the candidate.
BJP insiders said that the leadership should have plunged with alacrity into lending support to Dhanai to spilt the ruling coalition. “It is sad that the party failed to use the volatility in the ruling coalition. It rather fielded Geeta Thakur and Anil Goel and asked the former to withdraw in favour of the latter when the period of withdrawal was closing. That was a monumental bungling as Thakur was a Dalit and CM Rawat was canvassing votes for Tamta who is a Dalit. This miscalculation has stupefied us. Thakur quitting BJP and joining Congress put the last nail in the BJP’s coffin as far as the RS election was concerned,” said a BJP insider.
There is wide-spread resentment in the state BJP roost over one of the BJP MlAs Dan Singh Bhandari resigning as a member of the Assembly a few hours before the election. “Nothing was left for us after two of our leaders quit in a span of a few hours,” said a senior BJP leader who insisted on anonymity.
Sounding mystified by the unexpected turn of developments just ahead of the RS election, the BJP state leader said two answers were there as far as suicidal decision of the party brass to favour Goel at the expense of Dalit Thakur was concerned.
“Either those running the state unit of the party are nincompoops, just prattling children before the crafty Harish Rawat or there is a more sinister game of Rawat keeping them stuck to his strings,” the party leader confided on condition of anonymity.