Constituency Watch Dharamsala: BJP rebel files papers as Independent, triangular contest on cards

Lalit Mohan

Dharamsala, May 10

The Dharamsala Assembly byelection is likely to witness a triangular contest. The byelection was necessitated after Congress MLA Sudhir Sharma resigned from the Assembly and joined the BJP along with five other Congress MLAs. The BJP has fielded Sharma from the Dharamsala seat.

The Congress has given ticket to former Mayor Davinder Jaggi for the Dharamsala bypoll. Meanwhile, BJP rebel Rakesh Chaudhary today filed nomination papers as an Independent candidate for the Dharamsala bypoll after the Congress denied him ticket.

Chaudhary had resigned from the BJP after the party gave ticket to Congress rebel MLA Sudhir Sharma. He lobbied hard for the Congress ticket. Many state-level Congress leaders as well as from Kangra district also supported Chaudhary’s candidature for the ticket from the Dharamsala seat considering his better winning prospects. However, the party chose Jaggi over Chaudhary as the former enjoys the full support of Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu.

Sources said that the Chief Minister gave weightage to loyalty to the party over the winning prospects while selecting Jaggi for the Dharamsala bypoll.

Chaudhary will be fighting the Assembly election from Dharamsala for the third consecutive time. He had fought the 2019 Assembly byelection from the seat as an Independent candidate and got about 17,000 votes. He had finished second behind the winner, Vishal Nehria of the BJP.

In the 2022 Assembly elections, Chaudhary had contested on the BJP ticket and secured about 24,000 votes but lost to Congress candidate Sudhir Sharma. Now, Chaudhary will once again contest the Dharamsala byelection as an Independent candidate, relying heavily on the OBC vote bank in the constituency.

Jaggi, a former Mayor of Dharamsala, enjoys support in the city area. Political observers say that he will have to work hard to get votes in rural areas of the constituency to increase his chances of winning.

Jaggi will have to answer the question as to why the Congress government has not deposited Rs 30 crore for the transfer of forestland at Jadrangal for the construction of the campus of the Central University of Himachal Pradesh. The issue has generated a lot of political heat in the constituency as it is a major development project.

BJP candidate Sudhir Sharma is relying heavily on his personal support base in the constituency and the party’s vote bank. He is expecting that the loyal BJP vote bank in Dharamsala will get transferred to him in the bypoll and he will again emerge victorious. He is also expecting that Chaudhary will make a dent in the Congress vote bank.

Meanwhile, Gaddi community leader Vipin Nehria is reluctant to fight the Dharamsala bypoll. Nehria, a former ST Morcha president of Kangra, said, “I don’t want the attention of people to get diverted from voting for Narendra Modi and so will not contest the byelection.”

No Gaddi leader contesting the byelection may prove beneficial for the BJP in Dharamsala, as a majority of the community voters are party loyalists.