Himachal Pradesh cabinet’s decision to extend the tenure of mayors and deputy mayors from two-and-a-half years to five years has ignited a political controversy, with the opposition BJP alleging the move is designed to help the Congress government avoid an electoral defeat it sees as inevitable. The decision comes just three weeks before Shimla Mayor Surinder Chauhan and Deputy Mayor Uma Kaushal were scheduled to complete their terms on November 15.
The timing has raised eyebrows across the political spectrum. Surinder Chauhan, known to be a close confidant of Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, now gets an extended lease on the mayoral post until 2028 without facing voters. Cabinet Minister Harshwardhan Chauhan justified the decision as necessary to curb “buying and selling” of councillors, referring to alleged horse-trading and defections that have plagued urban local bodies.
However, Leader of Opposition Jairam Thakur dismissed this explanation as a convenient pretext. “The Chief Minister is running away from the mayoral election because he knows his failures. He realizes that his own councillors will not support the Congress mayoral candidate,” Thakur alleged. He pointed to a pattern of the Sukhu government postponing democratic contests—first urban local body elections, then panchayat polls, and now effectively the Shimla mayoral election.
The rotation policy introduced in 2016 had deliberately limited mayors and deputy mayors to two-and-a-half-year terms within the five-year municipal corporation tenure, ensuring regular democratic renewal and preventing power concentration. The cabinet’s reversal of this framework removes a key accountability mechanism. Critics argue that if preventing defections is the genuine concern, the government should strengthen anti-defection provisions rather than eliminate elections.
The decision becomes more problematic when viewed against internal demands within the Congress itself. Women councillors from both Congress and BJP had been vocally demanding that the next mayoral position be reserved for women, citing their clear demographic majority—21 out of 34 councillors in Shimla Municipal Corporation are women. By extending the current mayor’s term by two-and-a-half years, the cabinet has not only avoided an immediate election but also sidestepped the question of women’s representation and eliminated possibilities for leadership rotation within party ranks.
The move fits into a broader pattern that has troubled opposition parties and democratic watchdogs. The government postponed panchayat elections that were scheduled for December 2025-January 2026, citing monsoon damage and damaged roads. This came after Chief Minister Sukhu had explicitly assured the Vidhan Sabha that panchayat elections would proceed as scheduled despite disaster-related challenges. The subsequent postponement using the Disaster Management Act directly contradicted this public commitment.
