Former CM Harish Rawat & Chakrata MLA Pritam Singh holding their own shows; Harak Singh maintains stoic silence
Saturday, 19 November 2022 | PNS | DEHRADUN
Even as the former president of Congress party Rahul Gandhi is on a gruelling 3,500 kilometres, 150-day long Bharat Jodo Yatra, senior leaders of the Congress in Uttarakhand are continuing to move in divergent directions. The recent events and the participation of leaders in the Uttarakhand leg of the Bharat Jodo Yatra clearly suggest that the leaders of the grand old party are not able to get connected with one another. In the latest example of the deepening fissure lines in the State unit of the party, Congress stalwart and six-time MLA from Chakrata Pritam Singh has announced his plans to hold a massive protest in Dehradun on November 21. The former Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) president has not informed the State unit of the party about his plan. The PCC president Karan Mahara has accepted that he is unaware about the protest plan of Singh and said that he will not attend the programme. In an attempt to shield his frustration Mahara is claiming that there is an internal democracy in the Congress party which does not exist in the Bharatiya Janata Party. Meanwhile, the former chief minister Harish Rawat too would remain away from the protest of Pritam Singh. Interestingly he is busy with his own programmes.
Political observers opine that by holding a protest march to the State secretariat, Pritam Singh wants to flex his muscles and stage his show of strength. They point out that Singh was removed from the post of PCC president before the Assembly election of 2022 to make way for Harsih Rawat supported Ganesh Godiyal and was placated by the party with the post of Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the last Assembly is feeling alienated in the party. After the defeat of the Congress party in the Assembly election, Pritam who won from his family bastion of Chakrata for the sixth consecutive time was not offered the post of the LoP in the Assembly which he was hoping to get. To make things difficult for him Karan Mahara who was deputy leader of the Congress legislature party (CLP) in the last Assembly and who was defeated in the high stake Assembly election of 2022 from Ranikhet was made the PCC president by the party high command. Singh’s recent utterances on the in -charge of the Uttarakhand Congress Devendra Yadav questioning his absence from the State appear to stem from his frustration. Though Pritam Singh has consistently denied that he holds any grudge against the party and has stressed that his protest march is an attempt to put the government on the dock for its failure on all fronts, it is an open secret that he is not happy. He appears to tread the line of former CM Harish Rawat who works on his own in organising programmes without taking the State unit into loop. Apart from these leaders the senior leader Harak Singh is also missing from the scene completely. After coming back to the Congress party’s fold just before the assembly elections he has kept a low profile which is very uncharacteristic of him and the kind of politics he is known to engage in.
