Tirath Singh Rawat resigns : Eight of the nine CM's couldn't complete five years in office since Uttarakhand became a state

In over 20 years of its existence as a state, Uttarakhand has had nine Chief Ministers, including outgoing Rawat, and twelve chief ministerial tenures,  Six of the nine CMs, including Nityanand Swami (2000-2001) and Bhagat Singh Koshyari (2001-02) – both legislative council members in office before the state conducted its first election – were from the BJP.

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The only Chief Minister to have completed a full five-year term in the hill state was late Narayan Datt Tiwari, the Congress leader, who, as first elected CM of the state, held the office between 2002 and 2007.

Bhuvan Chandra Khanduri, BJP's first elected CM of the state, replaced Tiwari in March 2007. Khanduri’s term, however, lasted for just about two years until June 2009 when he resigned over the party’s poor performance in the 2009 general elections. He was replaced by Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’, the current Union Human Resource Development (HRD) minister in the Narendra Modi government.

Like his predecessor, Pokhriyal could not complete his full term. He resigned, amid corruption charges in 2011, a year ahead of the assembly elections only to be replaced by Khanduri again.

In the 2012 assembly elections, Congress won 32 seats against BJP’s 31 and Congress leader Vijay Bahugana took over as Chief Minister. Bahugana continued till January 2014 when he quit only to be replaced by his party colleague Harish Rawat who remained in office for two years and 55 days from February 2014 to March 2016. He became the Chief Minister again, albeit for a day, on April 21, 2016.

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Harish Rawat faced trouble when a group of Congress MLAs rebelled and joined hands with the BJP. Uttarakhand came again under the President’s Rule.

But on May 11, 2016, Harish Rawat won a court-monitored floor test in the state assembly  and continued to be the Chief Minister until March 2017.  In the same year, however, the BJP won the assembly polls bagging 57 of the 70 seats and Trivendra Singh Rawat took over as the state's eight Chief Minister.

On March 9,  Trivendra Singh Rawat quit a year before his five-year tenure could end. On July 2, history was repeated yet again, as Tirath Singh Rawat, the ninth Chief Minister, handed over his resignation to Governor Baby Rani Maurya, a year before the scheduled assembly polls.

In his reasons for resignation, Tirath Singh Rawat cited the constitutional requirement to get elected to the Assembly within six months of assuming the office. This,  he said, was not possible.

Tirath Singh Rawat is not an elected Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA). And the rule says, a minister, or a Chief Minister, who is not a member of the legislative assembly, must get elected "within six months" of assuming the post, as per the rule. So, outgoing Rawat would, anyway, have been forced to resign by September 10, six months after be was appointed for the top post.

The scheduled by-election for two vacant legislative seats in Uttarakhand was a chance for him to get elected to the Assembly. But the rules bar the conduct of by-polls in cases where the remaining tenure of assembly is less than a year. Uttarakhand is scheduled to go to the polls in early 2022.

But before that, the BJP is likely to announce the new, and the tenth, Chief Minister of the 20-year-old state today.