All four seats of Himachal Pradesh will go to polls in the seventh and the last phase of Lok Sabha election, on May 19. In a state where politics has broadly been bipolar, stakes are high for both national parties — the Congress and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
Riding on the ‘Modi wave’ in 2014, the BJP had won all the four Lok Sabha seats — Mandi, Kangra, Shimla and Hamirpur. Furthermore, the BJP returned to power in the state with a thumping majority in the 2017 assembly elections. However, all candidates face anti-incumbency, and whether this will be a factor on Sunday, remains to be seen.
There are 45 candidates in the fray and Nisha Katoch, an Independent, is the only woman candidate. She will fight from Kangra. BJP has repeated two sitting MPs, and fielded fresh faces in the other two.
In Hamirpur, Congress candidate Ram Lal Thakur is a state legislator. He will contest against three-time parliamentarian Anurag Thakur of the BJP. The saffron party has not lost this seat since 1998, and Anurag Thakur’s father, Prem Kumar Dhumal, is the former chief minister of the state.
In Mandi, the home district of chief minister Jai Ram Thakur, the BJP has reposed its faith in its sitting MP Ram Swaroop Sharma. Pitted against him is Congress nominee Aashray Sharma, the grandson of former telecom minister Sukh Ram. In Shimla, the BJP has swapped current MP Virender Kashyap with Suresh Kashyap, the sitting legislator from Pachhad while Congress has fielded former two-term MP colonel (retd) Dhani Ram Shandil. Shimla has traditionally remained a Congress stronghold, but the party lost it in 2009 and 2014. Hoping to regain ground, party president Rahul Gandhi held his last campaign rally here, on Friday.
{{/usCountry}}In Mandi, the home district of chief minister Jai Ram Thakur, the BJP has reposed its faith in its sitting MP Ram Swaroop Sharma. Pitted against him is Congress nominee Aashray Sharma, the grandson of former telecom minister Sukh Ram. In Shimla, the BJP has swapped current MP Virender Kashyap with Suresh Kashyap, the sitting legislator from Pachhad while Congress has fielded former two-term MP colonel (retd) Dhani Ram Shandil. Shimla has traditionally remained a Congress stronghold, but the party lost it in 2009 and 2014. Hoping to regain ground, party president Rahul Gandhi held his last campaign rally here, on Friday.
{{/usCountry}}
The BJP ran a high decibel campaign focused on nationalism and the air strikes on Jaish-e-Mohammed’s terror camp in Pakistan’s Balakot in February. State leaders mostly talked about the achievements of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. BJP’s state unit chief Satpal Singh Satti was issued three notices by the Election Commission (EC) for using slurs against Congress president Rahul Gandhi and general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.
Congress brought up BJP’s unfulfilled promise of raising the import duty of apples, from 50% to 70%; the state is known as the ‘apple bowl of India’ and a major contributor to the country’s apple export.
“National rhetoric overshadowed the local issues and to some extent, the Modi wave seems to be alive to bail the BJP out. The Congress may give tough competition at Shimla and Kangra but chief minister Jairam Thakur’s image will play a positive for the BJP,” Harish Thakur, political science professor at Himachal Pradesh University said.