For the wily Harish Rawat, the veteran Congress leader from Uttarakhand, politics has always been a battle of nerves and he appears to have been made of nerves of steel.
The septuagenarian former Uttarakhand chief minister is also a survivor of sorts, having convinced the Congress leadership, aiming for a generational change across the country, to place their trust in him ahead of the Assembly elections in the hill state.
Having lost the chief minister’s race after ensuring the Congress’ victory in the 2012 Assembly elections, Rawat chose to wait till the central leadership’s choice Vijay Bahuguna stumbled on the administration front after the Kedarnath floods of 2013.
The Congress handed over the ‘crown of thorns’ to Rawat on February 1, 2014, just months before the general elections, helping him fulfil a long-cherished dream of becoming the chief minister.
His tenure ended on a sour note with Rawat losing the 2017 polls from both the seats he contested and Congress ending a distant second to BJP which won 57 seats in the 70-member house.
Sensing the uneasiness in the BJP ranks quite early, Rawat gradually increased his tours of the state, re-establishing himself as the only leader with a mass appeal in the faction-ridden Congress.
Rawat, who did not hold any official party post in the Uttarakhand Congress, then egged on the party leadership to name a chief ministerial face for the next Assembly polls and even suggested his arch-rival and the then Leader of the Opposition Indira Hridayesh as a possible candidate.
Having helped the Congress settle the leadership issue in Punjab by anointing Rahul Gandhi favourite Navjot Singh Sidhu as the state unit chief, Rawat has now set his eyes on winning back Uttarakhand.
On July 22, Congress named Rawat as the Chairman of the Campaign Committee for the 2022 Assembly elections, edging out his arch-rival Pritam Singh from the post of the president of the state unit of the party.
Ganesh Godiyal, a Rawat loyalist, was appointed as the Uttarakhand Congress president, and the AICC leadership also accepted his formula of appointing four working presidents in the state unit.
The challenges before the “unchallenged leader” of the Congress in Uttarakhand are immense, the topmost being getting the support of the sulking leaders within the party.
But his focus, at present, is to take advantage of the unease within the BJP ranks over the appointment of 45-year-old greenhorn Pushkar Singh Dhami as the chief minister.
Senior leaders Satpal Maharaj and Harak Singh Rawat, who were among those who quit the Congress to join the BJP before the 2017 elections, were upset with Dhami’s appointment.
Back to playing mind games, Rawat declared that some BJP leaders had sent him feelers and Congress’ doors were open for “anyone willing to join it but after proper analysis”.
He sought to send another message to the sulking BJP leaders by appointing Chandra Shekhar Upadhyay, the great-grandson of BJP ideologue Deendayal Upadhyay, as his advisor, citing his role in fighting court cases of those involved in the statehood movement.
In Uttarakhand, Rawat is seen as a great survivor, who bettered the BJP in their attempts to topple his government in 2016 by mounting a tough legal challenge.
Though he lost the 2017 elections, his tooth and nail fight against the BJP won him admirers within Congress.
Born in Almora in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand, Rawat is a product of student politics at Lucknow University, where he was known for his feisty nature.
His Lok Sabha entry was in style having defeated another Almora-born leader Murli Manohar Joshi, then a Janata Party candidate, in the 1980 elections. Rawat retained the Almora seat for two consecutive elections – 1984 and 1989.
He built a team of loyalists in the Almora Parliamentary seat, where he tasted defeat for five successive elections, but persevered and kept himself busy in the party’s trade union outfit INTUC and Seva Dal.
He was considered as a front-runner for the post of the chief minister when Congress won the first-ever Assembly poll in Uttarakhand in 2002. However, the party opted for Narayan Dutt Tiwari.
Over the years, Rawat has earned the trust of the party high-command by strongly rooting for Rahul Gandhi’s return as party chief and hitting out at the G-23 change seekers in the party.
Despite his detractors joining the BJP en masse in 2016, Rawat still is on a trickier terrain in Uttarakhand as newer rivals have emerged in the party who have expressed their disappointment at his projection as the next chief minister.
The attempts by the Aam Aadmi Party to make inroads in Uttarakhand too pose a challenge to Congress.
Rawat appears to be making every possible move in his political strategy book to get closer to the 'crown of thorns' yet another time.