Uttarakhand CM Pushkar Dhami resigns day after assembly election results

Dehradun: Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami on Friday along with the state cabinet submitted his resignation to the governor Lieutenant General Gurmit Singh at Raj Bhavan.

As per the practice, he will continue as the caretaker chief minister till the new government is sworn in. In a tweet in Hindi today, Dhami wrote, “As we have received a tremendous amount of support in Uttarakhand my cabinet and I submitted resignation to Governor Gurmit Singh today.”

The BJP has come back to power for the second consecutive term in Uttarakhand with a two-thirds majority in the 70-member Assembly.

The party won 47 seats and got a vote share of 44.33 per cent, a drop of nearly two per cent from the previous 2017 Assembly elections. The BJP had secured a 46.51 per cent vote share in the 2017 Assembly election.

However, the BJP suffered a loss of 10 seats in comparison to the previous polls in 2017 when the party had come with an even bigger majority with 57 seats.

The incumbent Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami, however, suffered a loss to Congress candidate Bhuwan Chandra Kapri by a margin of 6,579 votes in the Khatima constituency. Dhami got a total of 41,598 votes with a vote share of 44.8 per cent as against Kapri who got 48,177 with a huge vote share of 51.89 per cent.

However, some BJP MLAs including Kailash Gahtori and Suresh Gadiya have expressed their willingness to give up their respective seats for Dhami to contest as he suffered defeat in Khatima.

The Congress party, which was hoping to return to power in this election managed to win 19 seats. The party’s top leader and former chief minister Harish Rawat lost his seat from the Lalkuwa seat to BJP’s Mohan Singh Bisht by 17,527 votes.

Anupama Rawat, daughter of Harish Rawat defeated sitting minister Yatishwaranand from the Hardwar Rural seat by a margin of 4,472.