Mumbai: By losing from both the assembly seats in Uttarakhand—Hardwar rural and Kichha—the outgoing Uttarakhand chief minister Harish Rawat seems to have finally faced the wrath of popular will.
In his previous two stints as the chief minister, Rawat was arguably not the popular choice.
He was more of an imposed chief minister, especially after nine Congress MLAs moved towards the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in May 2016, in an open display of lack of faith in Rawat’s leadership.
The Congress persisted with Rawat and was also helped by the Modi government’s inept handling of Uttarakhand such as imposition of the President’s rule, which the Uttarakhand high court quashed and the Supreme Court ordering a floor test which the Congress won.
Rawat continued as the chief minister while the BJP kept chipping away at the Congress government and exploiting anti-incumbency as well as Rawat’s failure to bring development to the hilly state. The seeds of the result in 2017 were sown last year.
To be sure, Rawat, 69, campaigned nearly single-handedly against the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Though Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi did address a few meetings, it was mainly Rawat who led from the front and who was the target of the BJP and Modi. The Congress defeat in Uttarakhand is also on account of the spillover effect of the Modi wave in Uttar Pradesh, Rawat, too, contributed towards the defeat.
Political observers think Rawat was not never the kind of development-oriented chief minister the party made him out to be. “I would not call Rawat a development man though the rebuilding of Kedarnath temple started during his tenure. Despite being well aware of the problems of the hilly areas and rural parts of Uttarakhand, Rawat did not bring development to regions beyond Dehradun. He did start his stint with the promise of development but like with most previous chief ministers, this promise remained confined to Dehradun only,” said Prof. Annpurna Nautiyal, professor and head of the department of political science, HNB Garhwal University.
In 2014, Rawat had famously said that he was inspired by the central protagonist in the Hindi film Nayak-the Real Hero, played by Anil Kapoor, who gets to become the chief minister for a day, and who takes a number of people-friendly decisions in that single day.
Rawat also earned this dubious distinction of being the chief minister for a single day on April 23, 2016 when the Uttarakhand High Court reinstated him and dismissed the President’s rule in the state.
Next day, the Supreme Court ruled that the Uttarakhand HC decision be kept in abeyance till April 27.
Later, Rawat returned as the chief minister in May 2016 when the Congress won a SC-ordered floor test. This time around, Rawat faced a conclusive and truly democratic defeat.
At 69, with the Congress party itself in the throes of an existential crisis, Rawat can hardly look forward to a bright political future.
