Front-runner for the Congress ticket from the Gagret segment is former MLA Rakesh Kalia
The Congress has not yet revealed who would run against BJP candidate Chaitanya Sharma in the Gagret Assembly byelection. In addition to the Lok Sabha elections, two Assembly seats in the Una district—Gagret and Kutlehar—will soon have byelections.
Rakesh Kalia, a former Gagret MLA who just joined Congress again, is the front-runner for the party ticket. After not being given a ticket for the last Assembly elections, he left the Congress and joined the BJP. He had publicly worked against the Congress candidate in the previous elections and supported BJP candidate Rajesh Thakur.
When Kalia initially ran in the 2003 Assembly elections, she won the seat of Chintpurni from the incumbent BJP minister Parveen Sharma by a margin of 10,941 votes. During that period, Gagret was designated for Scheduled Castes, but Chintpurni was an open seat. In the 2007 elections, Kalia ran for the Chintpurni seat once again and beat BJP candidate Narender Sharma by a margin of 16,135 votes.
Gagret was designated as an open seat before to the 2013 Assembly elections, whereas the Chintpurni seat was set aside for Scheduled Castes. As a result, Kalia moved to Gagret and defeated BJP candidate Sushil Kalia in the 2013 Assembly elections with a margin of 4,879 votes. But in the 2017 Assembly elections, he was defeated by Rajesh Thakur of the BJP by a margin of 9,320 votes.
In an attempt to get a Congress ticket, Kalia resigned from the party when the BJP awarded Chaitanya Sharma a ticket for the Gagret byelection. In the presence of Rajiv Shukla, the AICC secretary and Himachal Pradesh in-charge, he returned to the Congress two days ago in New Delhi. According to his fans, he won’t go back to Gret until he has a ticket.
Congressman Brajesh Dogra, the vice-president of the district Congress, is one of the leaders who has claimed the party ticket. Dogra, a former Gagret panchayat pradhan, has a lot of clout with the state and federal party leadership. If the party decides to go with a fresh face, he is a solid contender.
Sharma Kuldeep Apart from Saroj Sharma, the secretary of the HPCC and a prominent figure in Mahila Congress, Deepu, the president of the Amb Truck Union and a member of the Zila Parishad from Gagret, and Raman Jaswal have also claimed the Congress ticket. Tatehda hamlet in the Gagret section is Saroj’s hometown.
Rakesh Kalia’s ticket was requested by members of the local Truck Union, headed by president Satish Sharma Gogi, during Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu’s recent visit to Gagret. Afterwards, the truck union requested a ticket for Kalia once again during Industries Minister Harshwardhan Chauhan’s visit to Gagret.
