Two Many Leaders

With the BJP camp divided between two contenders, this time it could be a close battle with the Congress

- Asit Jolly

Early morning on December 20, 2012, the day the Himachal Pradesh assembly poll votes were counted, Prem Kumar Dhumal, then the incumbent BJP chief minister, called his ‘good friend’ Narendra Modi in Gandhinagar to wish him luck (counting was under way in Gujarat too), perhaps hoping for some of the ‘Modi Magic’ to rub off on him. But it wasn’t to be. Three hours later, while Modi romped home to a fourth successive term in office, Dhumal prepared to felicitate his arch Congress rival, Virbhadra Singh.

As voters in the hill state prepare to elect its 13th Vidhan Sabha on November 9, the BJP is waiting its ‘turn’ in office. And it’s not an unreasonable expectation, given the alternating Congress-BJP cycle witnessed here since the post-Emergency polls in 1977 when Shanta Kumar trounced the Y.S. Parmar-led Congress to become the first saffron chief minister. Himachalis have never repeated a government since, barring the single exception in 1985, when the Congress replaced the tainted T. Ram Lal with Virbhadra, ahead of the polls.

But the BJP has a problem this time. Unlike earlier assembly elections, where Himachal Pradesh’s 4.9 million voters were reasonably certain of who their chief ministerial choices were, the party is headed into the coming polls without a CM face. This, while the Congress, usually a laggard, went ahead and named Virbhadra its CM candidate well before the announcement of the election schedule on October 12.