Uttarakhand BJP MLA Kailash Gahtori quit his Assembly seat of Champawat on Thursday in order that Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami contest from the seat in a bypoll, a constitutional requirement, as Mr. Dhami had lost his seat of Khatima in the recent Assembly poll.
Mr. Gahtori handed over his resignation to Uttarakhand Assembly Speaker Ritu Khanduri at her residence, accompanied by State BJP president Madan Kaushik, State Ministers Chandan Ram Das and Saurabh Bahuguna and MLA Khajan Das.
Mr. Gahtori is a two-term MLA and said that he was vacating the seat so that Mr. Dhami could fulfil his constitutional requirements of being a member of the Assembly within six months of being sworn in as Chief Minister for his second term.
Uttarakhand does not have a Legislative Council and is a unicameral legislature, making this inevitable. This is also not the first time MLAs of the BJP and even the Congress have vacated their seats in Uttarakhand to enable Chief Ministers not yet members of the Assembly to take their place.
Yogambar Singh Rawat had vacated his seat for former Chief Minister Narain Dutt Tewari in 2002, in 2007 the BJP poached Lt Gen T.P.S. Rawat (retd) from the Congress and made him quit his Assembly seat of Dhumakot and sent him to the Lok Sabha in another bypoll so that the then Chief Minister B.C. Khanduri could contest for the Assembly, and finally, in 2012 it was the Congress that repeated the act of poaching an Opposition MLA, Kiran Mandal of the BJP, who vacated his seat of Sitarganj in Udham Singh Nagar district for the then Chief Minister Vijay Bahuguna (who himself later defected to the BJP).
Mr. Dhami, it is being said, had been offered seats by several other party MLAs, but his choice revolved around Champawat, a seat he visited in early April.
The Election Commission will now have to announce a date for the bypoll to the seat.
