Pushkar Singh Dhami to take oath as next Chief Minister of Uttarakhand today

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Pushkar Singh Dhami will take his oath as the 11th chief minister of Uttarakhand on Sunday, a day after being elected as the leader of the BJP legislature party. He will be the third chief minister of the state in nearly four months. An MLA from Khatima, a town in the Udham Singh Nagar district of the state, Dhami rose through his ranks in the party after serving his tenure in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), as well as a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and the Bharatiya Yuva Morcha (BYJM), of which he was the state president for six years.

Uttarakhand went into a tizzy after the state's erstwhile chief minister Tirath Singh Rawat, who had replaced his predecessor Trivendra Singh Rawat earlier in March, resigned on Friday after holding the post for less than four months. Amid talks of a change of guard, two-time BJP MLA Pushkar Singh Dhami was elected on Saturday as the legislature party leader in the state and thus became the chief minister-elect. The consensus was reached after the party met on Saturday afternoon in Dehradun to discuss the issue.

At 45, Dhami will be the youngest yet chief minister of Uttarakhand. He takes over at a time when the state will be facing the assembly polls next year. He, however, said that he will take the challenge of the 2022 Uttarakhand assembly polls and "turn it into an opportunity".

Meanwhile, Congress alleged that the BJP is creating political instability in Uttarakhand by "changing ministers again and again like toys". The grand old party's chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala claimed that by indulging in a "chair-changing game", the BJP has betrayed the "devbhoomi" (holy land; a moniker for Uttarakhand) and its people who elected the party back in 2017.

Senior Congress leader Harish Rawat also pointed out that with Pushkar Singh Dhami, the BJP will now have eight chief ministers in Uttarakhand, three of who saw their tenures in the last four-and-a-half-years of the party's rule in the state.