New Delhi: When the Congress managed to come to power in Uttarakhand in 2012, everybody was hoping that strongman of the party in the hill state, Harish Rawat, would be made the chief minister. The party high command in New Delhi shocked all of them by appointing a lightweight MP Vijay Bahuguna to the post of chief minister ignoring Rawat's ‘legitimate' claims. An angry Rawat refused to come out of his house in New Delhi for weeks. Finally, he was persuaded to drop the claim and was elevated to the post of Union Water Resources minister.
Mishandling of the devastating floods in Uttarakhand in 2013 forced the high command to remove Bahuguna and appoint Rawat as the chief minister. Bahuguna reluctantly quit his post after some drama.
What is now happening in Uttarakhand is Congress's own making. It is now paying the price for making a political nobody Vijay Bahuguna a somebody in Uttarakhand politics completely overlooking Harish Rawat. An ungrateful Bahuguna has now joined hands with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to topple the same Congress government he headed just two years ago. A shocked Congress has now sacked his son Saket Bahuguna from the party.
Vijay Bahuguna, son of former Uttar Pradesh chief minister HN Bahuguna, is a late entrant to politics. He was a judge at the Bombay High Court who quit under mysterious circumstances in the 1990s. He won a Lok Sabha by-poll from Tehri-Garhwal in 2007 and repeated the feat in 2009. Using his high command connections, he snatched the chief minister's chair away from Rawat. The decision of the high command to impose Bahuguna had upset a lot of Congress MLAs in the state. Some of them were camping at Rawat's house in New Delhi demanding that Bahuguna be removed and Rawat should be made chief minister. Their demands fell on deaf ears of the party bosses.
Between 2012 and 2014, Bahuguna managed to run the state with the help of a small coterie opposed to Rawat. Known as an arm chair politician, he was never close to the masses like Rawat. When flood of the century hit Garhwal region in June 2013, Vijay Bahuguna was spending time in New Delhi. He returned to Dehradun only after media made it a big issue calling him an insensitive chief minister.
A few months ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Rawat was sent to Uttarakhand as chief minister. But, he did not have much time to put the house in order to win some seats. Expectedly, the Congress lost all five Lok Sabha seats it had swept in 2009.
Instead of backing the party that made him somebody, Bahuguna has now turned against it. Nobody is shedding tears for the Congress high command. Finally, you reap what you sow.
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