By Arun Pratap Singh
Dehradun, 13 Jun: While Congress has not performed well in most of the elections in Uttarakhand after 2012, it appears to be confident about a good performance in the upcoming Assembly byelections to be held on 10 July in Manglaur (Haridwar) and Badrinath (Chamoli). There are reasons behind such confidence. The Badrinath assembly seat was won in 2022 by Congress. It fell vacant after the incumbent MLA, Rajendra Singh Bhandari, quit the party and resigned as MLA just days before the Parliamentary polls. However, what makes it challenging for the Congress to retain this seat is that, in the just concluded Parliamentary elections, BJP had a lead of around 9,000 votes over the Congress in this assembly segment. While the BJP secured around 32,000 votes, the Congress managed 23,000 votes. Secondly, Bhandari is considered to be an influential candidate and he managed not only to win election in the past as an independent candidate f but has also managed to get his wife elected as district Panchayat President. Compared to this, Lakhpat Butola has not been given the Congress ticket, so far, though he has been demanding the party ticket for long. Now that Bhandari, his arch- rival in the party has quit the party, he stands a good chance of obtaining the Congress ticket from Badrinath.
On the other hand, Congress sources claimed that the party ticket to Qazi Nizamuddin for the Manglaur seat is almost a certainty. Besides being a former 3-time MLA, he also managed to secure a good lead over the BJP and BSP from this assembly segment in the just concluded Parliamentary Elections. Congress managed to secure 44,000 votes from this segment, while the BJP could get only 21,000 votes. This is one seat that has never been won by the BJP ever since the formation of Uttarakhand as a separate state. Political pundits claim that, in the byelection, the main contest is likely to be between the Congress and the BSP candidates, with Congress having an edge. This seat had last time been won by BSP candidate Sarvat Karim Ansari, who had defeated Qazi Nizamuddin. It had fallen vacant due to the demise of Ansari. One interesting fact is that Qazi Nizamuddin, a three-time former MLA had won this seat twice on the BSP ticket and one time on the Congress ticket. When Nizamuddin had won on the BSP ticket, he had defeated Sarvat Karim Ansari who was in Congress then. When Nizamuddin had switched loyalty to Congress, Ansari quit the Congress and joined the BSP.
Sources claim that BSP is likely to field the son of late Sarvat Karim Ansari as its candidate and hope to gain sympathy votes.
