Flash floods of 2013 will hit the Congress hard in Uttarakhand

Pauri Garhwal: A news channel is once again running footage from last year’s flash floods in the mountains near the Kedarnath shrine, a grim reminder of the thousands of lives lost to an ecological disaster. As he watches, Shivendra Pandey, seated on the floor of his shop near Rudraprayag, looks around for the remote control, to switch to another channel. A former panda (priest) at the Kedarnath temple, Pandey still carries the psychological scars of that calamity in July 2013. He had to flee the area to save himself in July 2013. [caption id=“attachment_1469615” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  A file photo of the Uttarakhand floods of 2013. AFP.[/caption] Close to a year after the disaster, as the Chardham Yatra started once again on 2 May, memories of last year have begun to haunt not only those affected but also the Congress, the ruling party in Uttarakhand. The post-calamity development work, or the lack of it, is going to decide the fate of the Lok Sabha seats in the state, according to political observers here. One of the biggest worries for Chief Minister Harish Rawat is that his promise to people that he would reconstruct the mountain roads before the commencement of the Chardham Yatra has fallen flat. According to sources in the Congress, the only place where this will not affect the party’s prospects is in Rawat’s own constituency, Haridwar, which is pretty much on the flats and self-sufficient because of its own flourishing tourist economy. “Everyday, party workers have to answer angry voters and it will cost us a huge vote share. The state government should have taken better care of the situation,” says a Congress leader who was a minister in an earlier Congress government. While the Congress foresees trouble in constituencies such as Tehri Garhwal, it expects the biggest blow from the Pauri Garhwal constituency. This, especially after veteran Congress leader Satpal Maharaj, the Congress MP from the region, left the party to join the BJP. A popular leader, Satpal played an important part in the Uttarakhand statehood movement. “The government has completely failed to take care of thousands of people who lost their means of livelihood in the disaster,” he says. Even some Congress workers in Srinagar, the most important town of Pauri Garhwal, agree. “Satpal was the only person who could have offered a good challenge to BC Khanduri, the BJP’s candidate. With him gone, the Congress is in dire straits,” says Rajeev Bahuguna, a member of the Congress district committee. Satpal Maharaj taking on the Congress is only a reflection of his voters’ anger with the government. “The government has failed to measure the number of deaths till date. The number of casualties provided by it is only a tiny fraction of the number of people who really died in the natural disaster,” says Ravindra Raturi, a trader from Rudraprayag. The people of this valley are still unhappy with the way the relief work was conducted after the flash flood. “The Congress ministers got hold of the helicopters that were meant for bringing relief packages. They were travelling by helicopters to reach Kedarnath to appear in the media,” says Raturi. The Congress MLA from Rudraprayag, Harak Singh Rawat, who was criticised heavily for not doing enough in the aftermath of the disaster, is now the Lok Sabha candidate from Pauri Garhwal. However, if the sentiments of the people on the banks of the river Ganga are to be read, they don’t seem to have much faith either in the Congress or the BJP. They don’t feel either party will do much to save the river, the fulcrum of the ecology and economy of the mountains. “There are thousands of hotels on the river beds and how could they have been built without the politicians taking money?” asks Rakesh Negi, a 23-year-old student from Srinagar. “How come there were thousands of properties in Kedarnath? There was no clearance for building two, three-storey hotels in those areas. But it’s been done with the knowledge of the governments,” rues Rakesh, who will vote for the first time.