Four-time MLA Kuldeep Pathania named Himachal Pradesh Assembly Speaker; election to be held today

Senior Congress MLA Kuldeep Pathania (60) will be the new Speaker of the Himachal Pradesh Assembly.

The four-time MLA from Bhatiyat in Chamba district will be the consensus candidate whose name was proposed by Chief Minister Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu and backed by leader of opposition Jai Ram Thakur.

The election of the Speaker is slated to take place on Thursday.

Pathania, a lawyer by profession, will be the 18th Speaker of the Himachal Legislative Assembly.

The Congress, which has come to power in the state, has 40 MLAs while the BJP has a strength of 25 MLAs in the House.Three are independents in the 68-member House.

Earlier, Pathania also served as the chairman of the pollution board in the previous Congress government in 2012 -2017 although he had lost the election during that time.

He became an MLA from the Congress for the first time in 1985. For the second time in 2003, he was elected as an independent MLA. In 2007, he was again elected as an MLA for the third time and for the fourth time in 2022.

Earlier in the day, the House proceedings were marred by clashes between the opposition and ruling Congress over closure of more than 500 institutions opened by the BJP government ahead of the elections last year.

As the winter session of the assembly started on a sober note for the MLAs to take oath, Leader of opposition Jai Ram Thakur, the former Chief Minister, raised the issue of denotification of hundreds of institutions opened by his government. “This is a terribly wrong decision and reflects vendetta politics which the Sukhu government has started in the state. We never did this during our time even as the earlier Virbhadra Singh government had done a similar exercise to sanction institutions close to the polls,” he said.

Thakur said there was no Cabinet formed but the government was ordering denotification of the institutions. Only a Cabinet can pass such orders, he added.

“We demand that all the notifications to denotify the institutions be withdrawn,” Thakur said.

The House witnessed noisy scenes and slogans from the opposition benches protesting over the orders of notifications.

The ruling party MLAs also countered the BJP asserting the new government’s right to review the decisions of the government taken ahead of the polls. This did not satisfy the opposition which went on and staged a walk out from the House.

Later the Chief Minister, while replying to the issue, said, “More than 900 institutions and offices were opened by the government in the last nine months of the government. Why did the BJP government open these institutions during four and half years and suddenly only in the few last months. The move was highly political to win the elections but it did not work.”

He assured that the government will look into the matter on a case to case basis and those institutions justifiable will be restored. There is however no guarantee that all the institutions will be made functional as neither the staff was sanctioned nor posting of the employees was done. The decisions will have a burden of Rs 5,000 crore, he asserted.