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A few months ago, the Congress appeared to be on the track to regain power in Uttarakhand that goes to polls in February-March next year.
But that is no longer the situation now. The grand old party has lost the steam and the ground in the hill state due to several factors.
The first and the most important factor is the BJP's sudden move to replace Tirath Singh Rawat with a political lightweight Pushkar Singh Dhami who has started with a clean slate and fresh ideas to improve governance and beat the anti-incumbency.
The others are in-house problems. The Congress is facing massive infighting to the extent that party leaders are moving in different directions even as the cohesion and the unity is visibly missing on the ground.
While new state chief Ganesh Godiyal and legislature party leader Pritam Singh are clearly at cross purposes, former Chief Minister Harish Rawat is working independently.
State in-charge Devendra Yadav has failed to check growing factionalism.
The dissent resulted in the defection of Purola legislator Rajkumar to the BJP last week.
Many senior leaders have since come out in the open, expressing dissatisfaction at the functioning of the party and the way they were being treated.
The party tried to put up a united front at its 'parivartan yatra (march for change) in the first week of September.
But that show of strength could not sustain for long as former state Congress chief Kishore Upadhyaya has already sounded alarm bells by issuing a veiled warning to the leadership against sidelining him.
Uttarakhand is a cyclic state and no political party has retained power since it was carved out of Uttar Pradesh in 2000.
Going by the developments in the Congress, the BJP is smelling a chance to break that cycle this time.
To prevent the BJP from doing that, the Congress needs to immediately set its house in order.
Besides, the emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the political arena of the hill state is also going to cut into the anti-BJP vote and hurt the Congress' prospects.
All these developments do not augur well for the Congress in upcoming elections.