Himachal: No lead in 61 segments, Congress draws solace from vote share rise
Shimla, June 5
The Congress has lost all four Lok Sabha seats but it is drawing solace from the fact that its vote share in the current elections has risen by over 14 per cent to 41.67 per cent compared to 27.5 per cent in the 2019 elections.
The party’s vote share has increased despite the fact that Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, eight ministers and five Chief Parliamentary Secretaries could not secure a lead for the Congress candidates in their home constituencies.
The Congress managed to secure a lead in only seven of the 68 Assembly segments, namely Kinnaur, Lahaul-Spiti, Rampur, Rohru, Jubbal-Kotkhai, Anni and Haroli. Even the Chief Minister could not stop Narendra Modi’s magic from working for the BJP in his home segment of Nadaun, where BJP candidate Anurag Thakur got a lead of 2,143 votes.
Sukhu said, “Yes, I agree we could not win the Lok Sabha elections but in the Assembly byelections, people rejected the BJP for its attempts to destabilise our government. Our strength has gone up from 34 to 38 in the Assembly.” He added that it was interesting to see how people voted for the Congress in the Assembly byelections and for the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections.
In fact, state BJP president Rajeev Bindal had sought Sukhu’s resignation on the ground that the Congress had failed to get a lead in 61 of the 68 Assembly segments.
It is in the Assembly segments of Kinnaur (8,562), Lahaul-Spiti (6,876), Rampur (21,437), Rohru (9,045) and Anni (8,328) that Congress candidate Vikramaditya Singh managed to get a lead due to his father and former Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh’s close connect with the people of these areas.
In fact, Virbhadra used to contest elections from Rohru before it was reserved for Scheduled Castes in the 2012 delimitation of seats, forcing him to shift to the Shimla (Rural) segment.
The BJP had registered a mammoth win in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections by polling 69.70 per cent votes, the highest in the country.
While Kangra candidate Kishan Kapoor had won by a margin of 4.77 lakh votes, Anurag Thakur had won by a margin of 3.99 lakh votes.
In fact, the BJP had got a lead in each of the 68 Assembly segments in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
The Congress also got a lead of 5,937 votes in the Jubbal-Kotkhai Assembly constituency of Education Minister Rohit Thakur and 1,535 votes in the Haroli segment represented by Deputy Chief Minister Mukesh Agnihotri.
The Congress could not get a lead even in one Assembly segment in Kangra and Chamba districts which are part of the Kangra Lok Sabha seat.
