The party high command is all set to take the final call on the appointment of the State BJP president during the crucial parliamentary board meeting slated in Delhi for December 15. The names of the present leader of the Opposition in the State Assembly Ajay Bhatt and the former cabinet minister Trivendra Singh Rawat are doing the rounds.
Citing the queer regional/ electoral equations of the State, the State BJP watchers say that the mantle is likely to fall on Rawat as he hails from Garhwal division which, given the latest delimitation, accounts 36 out of 70 Assembly seats with the rest 34 being spread across Kumaon. Chief Minister Harish Rawat who is all set to steer the Congress during the upcoming grand electoral battle is from Kumaon division and he represents Thakur community which comprises over 40 percent of the State’s electorate. To counterbalance these factors, the BJP high command is likely to anoint the former cabinet minister Trivendra Singh Rawat for the coveted state party chief’s post, say the party insiders. Notably, Ajay Bhatt hails from Kumaon and he represents the Brahmin community that comprises around 22 percent of the electorate here.
There is another constraint for the party top brass to favour Bhatt with the post, as in that case they must grope for his substitute for the post of the loP he is presently occupying. There too, they have to play the tough trapeze game of fine-tuning the mutually exclusive regional and caste interests. “Things are still far from crystallizing, fluid, but the portents are becoming palpably clear,” a political analyst said.
However, it would not be a cakewalk for Trivendra Singh Rawat to ascend the top post in the party’s organizational hierarchy, as two successive drubbings-first from Raipur Assembly constituency during 2012 Assembly election and again from Doiwala during the 2014 July by-poll-have been hanging from his neck like the mythical albatross. Besides, he is deemed a close confidante of the former Chief Minister and Udham Singh Nagar MP Bhagat Singh Koshyari to whom the other two former CM are inimical.
The saffron party happens to be in an unenviable position, as it would have firm up strategy while keeping all the three former CMs-Koshyari, Maj Gen Bhuwan Chandra Khanduri and Dr Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, all MPs now- in good humour.
Recently, Mussoorie MlA Ganesh Joshi had pointed the fault-lines set in the factionally bickering State BJP. While welcoming the newly appointed city BJP president Umesh Aggrawal here in Dehradun, he said sarcastically that while things were quiet on the front of the rank and file they were on the boil on the side of the dais where all the three ex CMs were seated. “He seemed to have hit the nail right on the head of the State BJP, hinting at the factional embers smoldering around the factor of personalized incompatibility,” said an observer.
Mention worthy, Chief Minister Harish Rawat is focusing on three plain districts – Haridwar, Udham Singh Nagar and Dehradun- which have 30 seats, in all. State BJP must consider this factor well while chalking out its strategy to take on the ruling Congress.