PIONEER EDGE NEWS SERVICE/Dehradun
Ganesh Godiyal who took over the reins of the Uttarakhand Congress from Karan Mahara in a well-attended ceremony on Sunday at the headquarters of the State Congress faces a daunting task of leading the party back to power. In Uttarakhand, the Congress has been out of power from 2017 when the BJP trounced the Congress in the Himalayan State by winning 57 seats in the 70 member assembly. Negating the anti-incumbency and reversing the trend of power changing hands every five years, the BJP led by the chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami regained power in 2022. In fact, the Congress has been on losing track in Uttarakhand from the parliamentary elections of 2014 when the BJP registered victory in all the five Lok Sabha seats of the State. Congress also lost to BJP 5:0 in the parliamentary elections of 2019 and 2024 making the decimation of the party complete in the State. In these years a large number of senior leaders such as Vijay Bahuguna, Subodh Uniyal, Rekha Arya, Kishore Upadhyaya, Dinesh Agarwal, Manish Khanduri to name a few have defected from Congress to join ranks with the ruling BJP. The successive defeats have not only affected the morale of the party cadre but it has also created a dent in the resources needed to contest election. In such a scenario Godiyal faces a challenge of motivating the rank and file of Uttarakhand Congress. Apart from boosting the sagging morale of the party workers, Godiyal also needs to bring together the senior leaders of the party who are divided into different factions.
Interestingly Godiyal was handed over the reins of the Congress party nine months before the Vidhan Sabha elections of 2022. Despite putting his best effort, he failed in his effort to bring the party back to power. He also lost his Vidhan Sabha seat (Srinagar) to his arch rival Dhan Singh Rawat of BJP. He was removed from the post of Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) president after the defeat of 2022. Now after much brainstorming and taking feedback the Congress high command has reappointed him to the coveted post of PCC president. The political analysts are of the opinion that since the VS election is still about 15 months away, Godiyal has enough time to resurrect the Congress fortunes in Uttarakhand. All the senior leaders including former chief minister Harish Rawat, former PCC president Pritam Singh and Karan Mahara and mercurial Harak Singh have openly backed Godiyal. In an astute move, the Congress high command has also appointed Pritam Singh as the chairman of the campaign committee and Harak Singh Rawat as head of the election management committee which will help the party in galvanising its organisation ahead of the Vidhan Sabha elections of 2027.
