Ahead of Assembly polls, Himachal Pradesh Rural Development Minister Anil Sharma quit the Virbhadra Singh government and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), on Sunday, 15 October.
Sharma, son of former Union Communication Minister Sukh Ram, said, “I have quit the Himachal Cabinet and joined the BJP today.”
I have been given a BJP ticket from Mandi and the party has informed me about this.Anil Sharma, Himachal Pradesh Rural Development Minister
Himachal Pradesh is slated to go to polls on November 9.
Sharma alleged that he and his father were being sidelined and ignored in the Congress. The AICC general secretary had invited Sharma’s father, Sukh Ram, to attend the rally of Rahul Gandhi in Mandi, but when he reached the spot, he was asked not to attend the same.
“Is Sukh Ram not a member of the Congress?" he asked.
"I was not included in any of the committees for the Assembly polls and when I asked about this from the HPCC president, he said that my name was deleted at the higher level. This hurt me and I decided to quit," Sharma said.
The Mandi seat was represented by Ram from 1962 till November 1984 when he was elected to the Lok Sabha, and his protégé, DD Thakur, won the seat in 1985, The BJP wrested the seat in 1990.
In the 1993 Assembly poll, his son, Sharma, won from Mandi, but after Sukh Ram's name surfaced in the telecom scam, he was expelled from the Congress and formed the Himachal Vikas Congress, which entered into a post poll alliance with the BJP and joined the government.
While Ram won from Mandi, Sharma was elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1998.
In the 2003 Assembly polls, Ram was the sole HVC member to win the election from Mandi, but he joined the Congress ahead of the 2004 Lok Sabha polls.
Sharma again won from Mandi in 2007 and 2012 as a Congress candidate, and is set to contest as a BJP candidate this time.
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