Who says there is no anger against BJP in Uttarakhand?

At local municipal elections held in the Dehradun area in November last year, anyone from outside Uttarakhand would have got the sense that BJP won overwhelmingly, including the Dehradun mayoral seat.

Uttarakhand now has a BJP government – as part of the five-yearly flip-flop between one party and the other. The only Chief Minister who has seen a full term through was ND Tiwari of the Congress, who had earlier been Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh as well, before the division of UP into two states.

So yes, Sunil Uniyal Gama of the BJP is mayor of Dehradun and by all accounts, he is a “good man”. The people of Dehradun desperately need a mayor and a municipal corporation that does something for the city. Garbage, drainage, sewerage, road surfaces are all massive problems. Not to mention health, education, sanitation, infrastructure and all the rest of it.

And that is why, when this BJP government tried to include the villages around Dehradun into the municipal system, local pradhans and panchayats put up a massive fight.

You cannot manage the Dehradun that you have, how on earth will you manage us, they asked. The panchayats won and stayed out. And what the news reports about the elections would not tell you is that several outlying areas of Dehradun city were lost to the BJP.

That includes Doiwala, the constituency from where current Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat of the BJP was elected. The BJP won council seats and the mayor’s post by slim margins, against Congress candidates while Independents did better than both parties.

The BJP’s most humiliating defeat, however, was in Mussourie, known as the “Queen of the Hills”, the pride of Garhwal’s tourism industry.

The hill station is in a mess, worse than it has been for years. In spite of all the laws, illegal construction is rampant. There is no parking. The roads cannot cope. There is no water. And the tourist traffic is relentless.

The BJP was wiped out in Mussourie in the local elections. Independents won most seats, and then the Congress. Implicit in this result is the anger against the ruling party and against political parties as well. There is an obvious lesson here if anyone is willing to listen, anyone who is not taken up with hubris and ego and waves.

The end count was BJP 34 seats, Congress 25 and Independents 23. For all promises made, there is a demand from voters that promises are kept.

Uttarakhand is reeling from unemployment as migration from the hills has not reduced. The effects of climate change are visible and palpable. The disaster of Demonetisation was felt deeply, since regardless of the reasoning or excuses put forward by the Narendra Modi government, digitisation is largely invisible in this hill state.

In the backdrop of the general elections, states like Uttarakhand have their own narrative. That is if anyone is listening.

(The writer is an independent journalist based in Dehradun)