Will not let Himachal mandate be hijacked: Congress on BJP’s 'Operation Lotus'

New Delhi: Congress today asserted that it will not let the popular mandate in Himachal Pradesh be hijacked with ‘Operation Lotus’.

“The mandate has to be respected”, the party general secretary in charge of Communications Jairam Ramesh told a press conference.

He said the BJP cannot say that the Congress had lost the mandate just because some MLAs had cross-voted.

Jairam Ramesh said the party president Mallikarjun Kharge has deputed three special observers who are holding parleys with the MLAs there. Their complaints and grievances are being duly heard and the report will be submitted to the Congress president, he added.

The observers include former Chhattisgarh and Haryana Chief Ministers Bhupesh Bhagel and Bhupinder Singh Hooda respectively and Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar besides the AICC in charge for HP Rajiv Shukla.

Ramesh made it categorically clear that Congress had got a popular mandate in 2022 and “we cannot lose it with Operation Lotus”. He said, the BJP cannot claim that the Congress has lost the mandate just because some people had cross-voted against the party nominee, Dr Abhishek Manu Singhvi a prominent lawyer and senior spokesperson of the party.

He pointed out that it was a “clear convincing decisive mandate in favor of the Congress and against Prime Minister Narendra Modi who had extensively campaigned in the state, against JP Nadda, Jairam Thakur and Anurag Thakur”.

He said the Congress will not let that mandate be stolen as it was the BJP’s way of getting into power through the backdoor the way it did in Goa and Madhya Pradesh in the past. At the same time, he agreed that there had been cross-voting by some of the party legislators, which the party does not deny and was also looking into. Replying to a question, he said reasons would be examined and responsibility would be fixed.

Maintaining that all options were open, the Congress general secretary did not rule out any decision, saying that party interest is paramount over and above everything else. He said the final decision will be taken after the observers submit their report to the Congress president.

Mr Ramesh pointed out, that immediately after the formation of the government, the state was faced with devastating floods, which the government of India and Prime Minister Modi refused to declare as a national calamity. He said the Congress government confronted this calamity of its own.

He said, while the state government was in the process of fulfilling its guarantees, the BJP had started its “own guarantee” of Operation Lotus. But he made it categorically clear that the popular mandate will not be allowed to be hijacked and the mandate has to be respected at all costs.