Week before Himachal fiasco, Congress knew what was coming but was clueless about its scale

THE DEFEAT of Abhishek Manu Singhvi in Rajya Sabha election in Himachal Pradesh may have come as a huge embarrassment to the Congress but the central leadership and Singhvi himself had prior information that a handful of MLAs who were upset with Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu were restive and could cross over, sources said. In fact, it was the scale of the defection which surprised the party.

As the Congress looks back at what went wrong in Himachal to make sense of the fiasco, the picture that is emerging is of miscalculation and overconfidence.

Although the BJP’s decision to field Harsh Mahajan, a former Congress leader, was a clear signal that it was trying to tap into the discontent in the Congress, sources said the central leadership got a whiff of the seriousness of what was brewing in the Himachal Congress at least a week before February 27, the day voting for the Rajya Sabha election took place.

The leadership, sources said, zeroed in on the MLAs who were restive and then used multiple channels to reach out to all of them, including Sudhir Sharma and Rajinder Rana, the two who led the dissidents.

Accordingly, veteran leader Digvijaya Singh was roped in to speak to Rana, a Thakur who was once a loyalist of former Himachal Pradesh chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal. Similarly, AICC general secretary Randeep Surjewala was asked to speak to Sharma with whom he shared a good personal equation. Sources said Singhvi too had roped in a couple of leaders – and incidentally some “outsiders” – to speak to the others – Chaitanya Sharma, Inder Dutt Lakhanpal, Davinder Kumar Bhutto and Ravi Thakur.

That all was not well in the Himachal Congress was known for some time.

Himachal Pradesh Congress president Pratibha Singh and