Under the Vajpayee government in 2000, three states were carved out bringing the total number of Indian States to 28- Chhattisgarh from Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand from Bihar, and Uttarakhand from Uttar Pradesh. The political trajectory of the three states has since been starkly different from each other. While Chhattisgarh has been fairly stable politically with a bipolar contest between the Congress (INC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Jharkhand has seen more frequent changes in Chief Ministers and governments. Uttarakhand, however, has seen far greater instability than the two combined and quite literally--the number of different Chief Ministers in the state so far at 10, is more than Chhattisgarh's (3) and Jharkhand's (6) added together.As Uttarakhand goes to the polls with an incumbent government that has seen three different leaders, it is worth exploring why the state has seen such churn at the top. There are various ways to dissect this, but whichever way you look at it, what stands out clearly is that the state lacks a dominant leadership or a popular face so to speak. As we show, the roots of this go back to much before the state was formed, and this continues to play out in the way parties campaign today. No region-specific political movementsIn states such as Telangana, or even Jharkhand, parties that were associated with the demand for statehood continued to hold sway in the state’s electoral politics.Read also: Uttarakhand CM Dhami promises UCC if re-electedThe Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) in the former and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) in the latter, remain strong political forces in their states. However, Uttarakhand, while having significant political movements, has not seen these movements evolve into large-scale political churn. A possible reason for this difference could also be the co-option of the movement and cause for Uttarakhand’s statehood by the mainstream political parties (including the BJP and INC), thereby reducing the room for a separate political entity to emerge. This swift overtaking of the agenda for statehood by the two national parties possibly gave them greater ability to set the political tone in the state. This holds true even in the case of Chhattisgarh, but Uttarakhand’s situation is more acute with the absence of popular faces even within mainstream parties.
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