Vijay Deo Jha
Ranchi, Mar 12: The Congress may have miserably failed in Uttarakhand to unseat the BJP despite the anti-incumbency wave, but the stupendous efforts of Jharkhand Congress MLA, Dipika Pandey Singh has not gone unnoticed.
Even if the BJP stormed back to power, she brought despondency to the BJP since her careful planning brought defeat for BJP’s chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami who lost by about 7,000 votes to the Congress’s Bhuwan Chand Kapri in Khatima, Udham Singh Nagar district.
Bhuwan Chand Kapri was picked by Rahul Gandhi in the Youth Congress and Dipika Pandey Singh actively campaigned for him and managed electoral strategies.
The BJP won 47 seats but the result put the BJP in a dilemma as Pushkar Singh Dhami was tipped to continue in the post of the chief minister. Khatima was among 26 seats of Uttarakhand under her change. In the last assembly election held in 2017, the Congress out of these 26 seats had won only four seats. But the Congress in this election won 11 seats.
Dipika Pandey Singh, the MLA from the Mahgama assembly seat was appointed as co-in-charge of Uttarakhand on June 3, last year.
She spent her maximum time in Uttarakhand to strengthen the local party organization, holding rallies, roadshows, demonstrations, and other organizational programmes. She was hardly seen in Jharkhand since she was supposed to take care of the electoral and organizational strategies of those 26 seats out of 70 seats where the Congress was in a weak position. It was for the first time that the central leadership gave her such a big responsibility at the national level.
“Victory and defeat are a matter of collective responsibility. We made a collective effort but we lost. Naturally, I am disappointed with the result. But I have not lost hope. I learnt a lot out of this election and I will use this experience in future,” she said.
