Shimla: On the face of it, the event marked just another induction of a defector into a second party. But the family drama playing out in the background, with its soap-opera-esque twists and turns, had political observers riveted.
Sukh Ram, 92, a veteran politician credited with spearheading India’s telecom revolution (allegedly for considerable personal gains), joined the Congress Monday with grandson Ashray Sharma, 32, in tow.
His third innings with the Congress, Sukh Ram hopes, will earn Ashray a nomination from the Mandi Lok Sabha seat he has won thrice (in 1984, 1991 and 1996).
But it has queered the pitch for his son Anil Sharma, with whom he quit the Congress for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ahead of the 2017 assembly elections in Himachal Pradesh.
Anil, who was seen as Sukh Ram’s heir apparent thus far, currently serves as a minister in the state’s Jai Ram Thakur government, and his father’s latest political shift has made his own situation precarious, with the second-generation politician now considering resignation.
“I am in a dilemma,” Anil told ThePrint, “Neither of them — my son or father — takes me into confidence. I tried to convince them before they were inducted into the Congress, but gave up,” he added.
Asked why he defied his father to join the Congress, Ashray told ThePrint that it was “not me, but my grandfather [who] is more keen for my political debut”.
Anil is the BJP MLA for the Mandi assembly seat, a constituency he has earlier represented twice as a Congress candidate. He has had two previous stints in government, as a minister in the Virbhadra Singh administrations that took office in 1993 and 2012.
Chief Minister Thakur says the call on Anil’s fate in the party lies with the BJP high command, but he is said to be under growing pressure from leaders in Mandi to ask Anil to make his affiliations clear.
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Celebrated, incarcerated
Born in Mandi, Sukh Ram, called ‘Panditji’ by followers, is considered a towering Brahmin leader in Himachal Pradesh, a state dominated by Rajputs, with a rock-solid base in his home district.
He served as the Mandi MLA from 1963, contesting the first election as an Independent before joining the Congress, to 1984.
Sukh Ram made his Lok Sabha debut by winning the Mandi seat in 1984. In his second stint as MP, he served as Union telecom minister in the P.V. Narasimha Rao administration, a tenure that has earned him as much laurels as notoriety.
While he is credited with ushering in India’s telecom revolution, he was booked for corruption for allegedly accepting bribes to favour certain companies in the grant of contracts.
In 1996, the CBI recovered Rs 3.61 crore in cash during raids on Sukh Ram’s houses in Delhi and Mandi. Facing charges of corruption and disproportionate assets, he was arrested and chucked out of the Congress.
After his release from Tihar Jail on bail, he floated the Himachal Vikas Congress (HVC) in 1997, projecting himself as a potential chief ministerial candidate against Congress veteran Virbhadra Singh, promising to investigate corruption and nepotism in his government.
Local equations
Virbhadra and Sukh Ram are said to have shared an uneasy relationship, reportedly over the six-term chief minister’s discomfort with the latter’s clout.
When Virbhadra’s wife lost from the Mandi seat in 2014 to the BJP’s Ram Swaroop Sharma, the former openly blamed Sukh Ram for playing the caste card. Ram Swaroop is also a Brahmin.
In 1993, Virbhadra had scuttled Sukh Ram’s shot at the chief minister’s chair by leveraging his MLA supporters to wrest the office for himself, even though the latter had the blessings of Rao.
However, Virbhadra’s decision of going in for early assembly polls in 1998 boomeranged. Sukh Ram’s party won five seats in the election — including Mandi, won by Panditji yet again — and played ‘kingmaker’ to form a coalition government in alliance with the BJP.
Narendra Modi, the BJP general secretary in charge of Himachal Pradesh at the time, was instrumental in forging the tie-up with Sukh Ram.
As Prem Kumar Dhumal, the powerful BJP satrap, assumed office as chief minister, Sukh Ram was made a cabinet minister. However, he had to resign when a CBI court framed charges against him in the telecom case. Meanwhile, the same year, 1998, son Anil got a nomination to the Rajya Sabha.
Despite the investigation against him, Sukh Ram continued to court popularity among his constituents, a factor observers attribute to the impact of the telecom revolution in Himachal Pradesh, where it unleashed a vast network of optical fibres that sustained connectivity through blizzards, besides modern telephone exchanges and a chain of public calling booths in villages.
People weren’t ignorant of the corruption charges — they just didn’t matter to voters in the larger picture. Every politician makes money, voters would say at the time of his arrest, but “Panditji did so much for the state”.
Ahead of the 2004 Lok Sabha election, Sukh Ram merged the HVC with the Congress, vowing to not hold public office till he was cleared of all charges. His appeal is pending before the Supreme Court.
In 2007 and 2012, Anil won the Mandi assembly seat on a Congress ticket, and even served as minister in the Virbhadra Singh administration.
But by 2017, reportedly feeling humiliated in the Congress, Sukh Ram, along with Anil, was back with the BJP. That election, the BJP won nine of the 10 assembly segments in Mandi district. Sukh Ram has never hesitated to take credit for the BJP’s victory in Mandi, and the party doesn’t contest the claim either.
Also read: Sukh Ram, who once helped Dhumal form government, is no stranger to BJP
Third generation ahoy
Ashray is one of Anil’s two sons. His younger brother Aayush is a Bollywood newcomer, seen in the 2018 film Loveyatri, who is married to superstar Salman Khan’s sister Arpita.
Sukh Ram’s latest political leap is said to have come after the BJP refused to field Ashray from Mandi in the Lok Sabha election, choosing to retain incumbent MP Ram Swaroop Sharma.
The Congress, struggling to find a candidate for Mandi, may oblige. The party wanted Virbhadra Singh, 84, seen as the party’s only winnable leader in the state, to contest from the seat, but he declined.
His son Vikramaditya Singh, a first-time Congress MLA , showed reluctance as well, as did the party’s third choice, former state minister Kaul Singh Thakur.
However, supporters are uncertain if Sukh Ram’s image can survive yet another political shift.
“Panditji, who is called the Chanakya of Himachal politics, seems to have made a mistake this time…” said Chet Ram Thakur, a Sukh Ram loyalist, “The conditions don’t favour him or his grandson on the ground in Mandi as the Congress is a totally divided house.
“He (Sukh Ram) has revived ‘Aaya Ram, Gaya Ram’ politics,” said BJP state media in-charge Praveen Sharma. “It’s sheer political opportunism.”