Shimla: A day after the ruling Congress was defeated in the election to a Rajya Sabha seat from Himachal Pradesh, assembly speaker Kuldeep Singh Pathania “expelled” 15 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLAs. This came after the Opposition party sought a division of votes on the budget, which was eventually passed in its absence.
Chaos reigned in the Himachal Vidhan Sabha when the Speaker asked marshals to escort the 15 MLAs — including former chief minister Jai Ram Thakur — out of the House after the Congress introduced a motion for their “expulsion”.The remaining MLAs also eventually walked out of the House, paving the way for the Congress government to pass its budget.
The development came hours after a member of the cabinet, Vikramaditya Singh, resigned.
Thakur and his party had been claiming that the Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu-led government is now in the minority after six Congress MLAs and three Independents who were previously supporting the government cross-voted in the Rajya Sabha election held Tuesday. The cross-voting caused the Congress’s candidate, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, to lose to the BJP’s Harsh Mahajan.
This is “dictatorship”, former CM Thakur said in a statement he issued after he was forcibly removed from the House. “The government does not have the required numbers to pass the budget, which is why we have been expelled,” he told the media.
As the numbers stand officially, the Congress has 40 MLAs in Himachal’s 68-member House against 25 from the BJP.
Meanwhile, the six cross-voting Congress MLAs — Sudhir Sharma, Rajinder Rana, Chaitanya Sharma, Davinder Bhutto, I.D. Lakhanpal and Ravi Thakur — and the three Independents, Ashish Kumar, KL Thakur, and Hoshyar Singh, were accompanied by two BJP MLAs to an undisclosed location in Haryana’s Panchkula Tuesday evening but eventually came back to the assembly.
The developments come at a time of a festering factional war between Sukhu and Himachal Congress president Pratibha Singh and cast uncertainty over the Congress party’s lone government in north India. Singh, the mother of Vikramaditya Singh and wife of the late Himachal CM Virbhadra Singh, had been vying for the CM’s post in 2022 before Sukhu was finally chosen.
On its part, the Congress is trying to keep its flock together in the state, rushing in two senior leaders — Karnataka’s Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar and former Haryana CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda — as observers.
Sources within the party told ThePrint that the party may consider changing the chief minister if needed. “Four of the six MLAs were unhappy and it was quite evident that they were unhappy with the chief minister. If we talk about the nine MLAs, barring Ravi Thakur and K.L. Thakur, the others all come from the Hamirpur parliamentary constituency — the CM’s home turf. The Party will do anything to save the government,” said a minister who wished not to be named.
(This is an updated version of this report)