Hoshiyar Singh in Canada, has proposed his wife’s name for Dehra byelection

Lalit Mohan

Dharamsala, June 11

The announcement of three more Assembly byelections to be held on July 10 has taken prospective candidates and ticket seekers in the Dehra Assembly constituency by surprise. The Dehra seat in Kangra district had fallen vacant after Independent MLA Hoshiyar Singh resigned from the Assembly.

Sources said that Hoshiyar Singh was on vacation in Canada till June 20. He reportedly proceeded on holidays to Canada expecting that the byelections would be held along with the Haryana Assembly elections in October or November. Hoshiyar Singh was not available for comments but the sources said that he may return from Canada early due to the announcement of the byelections.

The sources said that Hoshiyar Singh had proposed to the BJP the candidature of his wife to contest the Dehra Assembly byelection but the BJP is yet to take a decision on his proposal. Besides Hoshiyar Singh, many ticket aspirant from the BJP in Dehra have started lobbying for the ticket. However, since Hoshiyar Singh had joined the BJP after resigning as an Independent MLA, the party would value his views on the byelections.

In the Congress, too, the tussle for the ticket for the Dehra byelection has started. Many Congress leaders want the ticket from the Dehra seat as the party had won four of the six Assembly byelections held along with the Lok Sabha elections in the state recently. Rajesh Sharma, who had contested the Dehra byelection on the Congress ticket in 2022 and lost to Hoshiyar Singh, was already campaigning in the segment.

Former Rajya Sabha member and senior Congress leader Viplove Thakur has openly advocated that the Congress ticket for the Dehra byelection should be given to a local leader. Some Congress workers have even taken to social media to propose that the wife of Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu should be fielded for the Dehra byelection.

Hoshiyar Singh along with two other Independent MLAs had resigned from the Assembly and joined the BJP. He had won the Assembly elections twice as an Independent MLA in 2017 and 2019, playing the card of being a local leader who was not aligned with any party and being devoted to the development of the Dehra segment.

The three Independent MLAs had resigned thinking that they would contest the byelections on the BJP ticket along with the Lok Sabha poll and gain from the Narendra Modi wave. However, the Speaker of the Vidhan Sabha, Kuldeep Singh Pathania, accepted their resignations after the Lok Sabha elections on June 3. This left the three Independent MLAs in a piquant situation. They would now have to fight a resurgent Congress as the state government was stable after the party won four of the six byelections recently.