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In a jolt to the ruling Congress in Himachal Pradesh, state party chief and Mandi member of Parliament Pratibha Singh on Wednesday announced that she has decided not to contest the Lok Sabha elections as the ground situation is not favourable.
“I have toured the state extensively and found that no worker is active and in such a situation, it is difficult to achieve success,” she told reporters in Shimla.
“I have declined to contest the elections as I am not in a position to put up a fight. You cannot win polls just by distributing MPLAD funds,” she said and added that if the party workers who had worked hard for the party’s victory in the assembly elections were given responsibilities and importance, they would have been active on the ground.
Pratibha Singh was back in Shimla after attending the Congress Working Committee and central election committee meetings in New Delhi on Tuesday.
Chief minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu was also in the national capital to decide on candidates for the four Lok Sabha seats and to deliberate on nominees for the six assembly seats that will go to the polls simultaneously on June 1.
The six seats fell vacant after the Congress legislators, who had cross-voted in the recent Rajya Sabha elections, also defied the party whip on voting for the state budget in the assembly. Pratibha had said there was acrimony towards Sukhu as 14 months after the Congress came to power in the state, leaders who worked hard to ensure the party’s victory were not accommodated by him. “Fourteen months is a long period and I have been consistently urging the chief minister to accommodate leaders who worked hard for the victory of the party but nothing was done,” she said. Had the issues of the disgruntled MLAs been addressed on time, the crisis could have been avoided, she added.
The BJP has dominated the last three Lok Sabha elections in Himachal Pradesh. It won all four seats in 2014 and 2019 and three in 2009.
The Congress won the Mandi seat in 2009 and Virbhadra Singh became a minister in the Manmohan Singh-led government. In December 2012, Virbhadra became the chief minister, and his wife Pratibha was elected as the Mandi MP in the by-elections. However, in the 2014 election, Pratibha lost to BJP’s Ram Swaroop Sharma, who won again in 2019, defeating Aashray Sharma of the Congress by getting 4.05 lakh votes. In 2021, Sharma ended his life at his house in Delhi. Following this, Pratibha was elected an MP from Mandi in a bypoll. Mandi is the only constituency under Congress control.
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