A day after being elected as the leader of the BJP legislature party, Pushkar Singh Dhami was scheduled to take his oath as the 11th chief minister of Uttarakhand on Sunday. In nearly four months, he will be the third chief minister of the state. He is an MLA from Khatima, a town in the Udham Singh Nagar district of the state. Pushkar Dhami rose through his ranks in the party after serving his tenure in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). He has also served as a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), of which he was the state president for six years.

State of Dev-bhoomi went into a tizzy after the state’s erstwhile chief minister Tirath Singh Rawat resigned on Friday after holding the post for less than four months. Tirath Rawat had replaced his predecessor Trivendra Singh Rawat earlier in March as the CM. On Saturday, two-time BJP MLA Pushkar Singh Dhami was elected as the legislature party leader in the state, amid talks of a change of guard. As a result, he became the chief minister-elect. The consensus over his leadership was reached after the party met on Saturday afternoon in Dehradun to discuss the issue.

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At 45, Pushkar Dhami will be the youngest yet chief minister of Uttarakhand. He is taking over the charge at a time when the state will be facing the assembly polls next year. Pushkar Dhami said that he will take the challenge of the 2022 Uttarakhand assembly polls and “turn it into an opportunity”.

Indian national Congress has alleged that the BJP is creating political instability in Uttarakhand by “changing ministers again and again like toys”. The party’s spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala claimed that by indulging in a “chair-changing game”, the BJP has betrayed the “devbhoomi” (it stands for holy land; a moniker for Uttarakhand) and its people who elected the party back in 2017.

Senior Congress leader Harish Rawat also pointed out that the BJP will now have eight chief ministers in Uttarakhand with Pushkar Singh Dhami. Harish further stated that three of the CMs saw their tenures in the last four-and-a-half-years of the party’s rule in the state.

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Background

Pushkar Singh Dhami spent 10 years in the ABVP as a college student. He worked with the RSS students’ wing at Lucknow University and other educational institutions in Uttar Pradesh. He is a post-graduate in human resource management and industrial relations. Dhami proceeded to the BJP Yuva Morcha, and he was its Uttarakhand president for two terms between 2002 and 2008.  He was the vice-chairman of the Urban Monitoring Committee with the rank of state minister under both BJP Chief Ministers Ramesh Pohkhriyal Nishank and Maj Gen BC Khanduri (retd).

BJP gave him ticket from Khatima in Udham Singh Nagar district in 2012 assembly election. He won that contest. He has been state vice-president, since 2016. He again won as an MLA in 2017. Subsequently, he was widely tipped to get a ministerial post under Trivendra Singh Rawat, but was left out. He was a surprise pick on Saturday.

Leaders in the saffron party believe that Dhami’s “young and energetic” image would help the party fight anti-incumbency as well as the Opposition’s accusations of political instability.