Arrest of Youth Congress members may have given CM Sukhu a lifeline

It is all very bewildering. The police are supposed to arrest criminals. But in Himachal Pradesh and Delhi, the police are arresting the police. At the heart of it all is politics.

 

When a group of young people from the Indian Youth Congress took off their shirts as a protest at the Global AI Summit in New Delhi (supporting “In Vest, not Invest”, the boys say), a posse of Delhi Police travelled all the way to the Chirgaon area, Rohru subdivision, Shimla district, and arrested them (later released). Claiming the boys were arrested without due process (you need appropriate paperwork to arrest someone in another state) the Himachal Pradesh police arrested the policemen from Delhi on kidnapping charges. Law and order, and police are squarely in the domain of the state governments. The “arrest/kidnapping” is before the court but cases have been registered against the policemen in both states. Law and order in Delhi is the responsibility of the Union government, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It is handled by Union Home Minister Amit Shah. The government in Himachal Pradesh is run by the Congress under the chief ministership of Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu.

 

And Mr Sukhu’s supporters reckon this controversy is the best thing that could have happened to him.

 

When he was made chief minister in 2022 after the Assembly elections, the road to the top job was hard, the Congress’ victory perilous. Although the Congress won the majority of the seats (40 of the 68), its vote share and that of the BJP were almost the same: 43.9 per cent against 43 per cent. The difference in the votes polled by the two parties was just 37,974. This was the smallest difference between two parties ever recorded in the state. At constituency level, the simple average of the percentage differences in vote share for all the 68 seats was 1.41 per cent, the lowest since 1951. So everything the Congress did had the BJP snapping at its heels.

 

It didn’t help that Mr Sukhu had many rivals. Some he was born with; some he thrust upon himself. He was president of the Himachal Pradesh Congress Committee but the late Virbhadra Singh, a six-time chief minister and the party’s tallest leader in the state, had remained firmly in command of the government and organisation. Mr Sukhu’s rise was actively encouraged by the Gandhi family, positioning him as a power centre alternative to that of Virbhadra Singh. This inevitably bred friction. The feud continued after Virbhadra Singh’s death, with his son Vikramaditya Singh, becoming minister for the Public Works Department but resigning from the Cabinet two years into the government's tenure because the chief minister kept delaying the installation of a statue of his father on the Ridge in Shimla alongside builders of modern Himachal Pradesh like Y S Parmar. The statue finally came up only after intervention by the Congress high command. That was not all. Deputy Chief Minister Mukesh Agnihotri’s emotional outburst at a Mandi rally in December last year (referring to the chief minister, he had said: “Working like this will not fly with the people”) had the silent critics of Mr Sukhu assessing their options. (The outburst was in the presence of Rajani Patel, who is in charge of the Congress’ Himachal Pradesh affairs.) Mr Agnihotri’s ostensible warning was to the bureaucracy, a section of which, he claimed, worked for the government but met the BJP leadership in the dead of night. His charge was also trained, it seems, against policemen.

 

To be fair, Mr Sukhu — and Himachal Pradesh — are also victims of nature. Heavy rain in August and September last year caused losses estimated at ₹3,500 crore — due to cloudbursts, flash floods, and landslides. Terrible damage was caused to roads, bridges, and water and power supply systems. Mr Sukhu invoked the Disaster Management Act, seeking urgent central assistance. That enabled him to postpone the panchayat polls but now, after the court’s intervention, they will be held in April.

 

With another Assembly election looming (2027), the state government has been lurching from crisis to crisis, with little to call its signature political investment although the old pension scheme has been restored (which was one of its election promises), and Himachal Pradesh has reported 99 per cent literacy. However, the state has a debt amounting to around ₹1 trillion and a revenue deficit of ₹10,000 crore following the discontinuation of the revenue-deficit grant, which is threatening to balloon into a major controversy.

 

In that context, the political discourse seems to be poised on the precipice of a Himachali-non-Himachali tirade brought on by quarrelling policemen. For Mr Sukhu however, this might just be the lifeline thrown to him in a turbulent, frothing river.