Why Amit Shah is to blame for Uttarakhand fiasco

It was meant to be BJP's big step towards realising its dream of a "Congress Mukt Bharat".  

Instead, its misadventure in Uttarakhand has proved to be a Himalayan blunder. Having successfully toppled the Congress government in Arunachal Pradesh, party chief Amit Shah and his team wanted to do an encore in the hilly state.  

Unfortunately for them, it didn't quite go according to script.

Harish Rawat survived the BJP-instigated rebellion by nine of his MLAs and went on to win the trust vote. The BJP didn't just lose out on the floor of the Assembly, it was out-thought and out-argued both in the high court and the Supreme Court.

The BJP had set its sights on Uttarakhand soon after Arunachal Pradesh. According to BJP sources, Kailash Vijayvargiya, its general secretary in charge of the Uttarakhand unit, was tasked by party chief Amit Shah to establish contact with disgruntled elements within the Congress fold.

Vijayvargiya first established contact with Saket Bahuguna. He in turn arranged for Vijayvargiya to team up with his disgruntled father, former chief minister Vijay Bahuguna. Still smarting at being unceremoniously replaced by Rawat following his mismanagement of the Uttarakhand floods, Bahuguna jumped at the opportunity to get even with Rawat.

The trio set about working on the Congress MLAs, stoking the ambitions of the likes of Harak Singh Rawat and luring MLAs who have been feeling neglected under Rawat. While Vijayvargiya liaised with the rebels, Amit Shah fine-tuned the operation to destabilise the state government. The Uttarakhand fiasco has left many in the BJP wondering why the party leadership tried and destabilised the state government barely seven months ahead of the Assembly elections.

The state is scheduled to go to polls in January 2017, and Congress by all accounts had been struggling to cope with the anti-incumbency factor. Its five-year rule had not been much to write home about, especially the period when Bahuguna was the state chief minister.

He made a mess of handling the flash floods in the hill state in 2013 and had to be replaced by Harish Rawat in February 2014. Many of the BJP MPs are of the view that had the government been allowed to continue, the BJP would have benefited from the anti-incumbency factor.

"God knows what we intended to gain by forming a government for six months," says a BJP MP from the state. Though none of the leaders are prepared to criticise the decision on record, in private, several of them have begun to question the wisdom of the Uttarakhand misadventure.

"Earlier, only the veterans were not consulted; now it appears barring a handful, everybody else in the party is considered brain-dead", a senior Rajya Sabha MP said.   

Many of the party MPs believe that the failed attempt at toppling the Rawat-led government has allowed him to don the mantle of victimhood and it might just generate some sympathy for him amongst the voters.