Sukhu's strategy of survival amidst adversity
This is a Chief Minister who has chosen conflict over compromise when the stakes involve resource rights.
AS Himachal Pradesh completes three years under Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, the familiar whisper returns: Will he last? In the age of engineered defections and Central armtwisting, the question is not trivial. But Sukhu remains firmly in the saddle.
A look at these three years reveals a story that runs counter to the national pattern: a government under siege that has not collapsed; a CM who has confronted corporate pressure, internal sabotage, climate catastrophe and an unsympathetic Centre — and still stands. This itself is a political statement in today's India.
For years, big hydropower companies enjoyed a free run in Himachal: delayed projects, underpaid royalties and minimal accountability. Sukhu broke that pattern. The state's recent victory — compelling JSW Energy to raise its royalty from 12% to 18% for the 1,045 MW Karcham-Wangtu project — was not just a legal win. It was a rare moment when a hill state asserted its ownership over its own rivers and mountains.
Equally significant was the decision to cancel 194 long-stalled hydropower projects. In a landscape where corporate names often dictate policy, this "perform or perish" signal was a rupture — an insistence that the state's resources cannot be held hostage by private delays.
Add to this the crackdown on illegal mining — including the now famous case of a Hamirpur stone-crusher operating under the guise of closure — and a pattern emerges. This is a CM who has chosen conflict over compromise when the stakes involve resource rights. Hill-state CMs are often seen as pliable junior partners in the national economic script. Sukhu has refused that role.
His political survival shows agility. The 2024 Rajya Sabha cross-voting episode could easily have collapsed the government. Several MLAs voted for the rival candidate, the political equivalent of a grenade rolled into the ruling party's camp. Many expected the familiar script to follow: engineered defections, a midnight parade to Raj Bhavan, a toppled hill-state government.
Instead, Sukhu absorbed the shock, contained the damage and emerged stronger — partly because he refused to panic and partly because he understood the deeper game: in fragile political systems, survival itself demands strategy. He tightened organisational control, made tough administrative calls and refused to be blown over by internal turbulence or the Centre's cold hostility.
But what gives him legitimacy on the ground is not political manoeuvring — it is the government's welfare architecture. The restoration of the Old Pension Scheme (OPS) for 1.36 lakh employees remains one of the signature decisions of his tenure. For thousands of Class-IV and daily-wage workers, the crediting of previous service years — making them pension-eligible — corrected an old injustice.
Over the last three years, the government has expanded its social-security footprint: enhanced MSP for milk and support for dairy, livestock and natural farming, crucial for small farmers, a noteworthy feature that has even arrested migration in milk-producing areas; a Rs 680-crore self-employment start-up scheme in a state where youth joblessness fuels migration; the announcement of 25,000 new posts overall; the plan for modern day-boarding schools and interest-subsidised education loans; rapid clearance of long-pending medical reimbursement bills of pensioners.
Unlike the transactional politics of short-term giveaways, these measures indicate a deeper ambition: the attempt to shift Himachal from a patronage-driven welfare model to a rights-based social-security system. Sukhu calls it Vyavastha Parivartan.
No recent Himachal government has been tested as brutally by nature. The 2025 Human Development Report estimates Rs 46,000 crore in losses and almost 1,700 deaths over four years. Monsoons have turned into annual calamities: cloudbursts razing villages overnight, landslides snapping highways, homes crumbling on slopes once considered stable. In the 2025 monsoon season alone, thousands of families lost homes, land, livestock and livelihoods. Relief had to be immediate —and the Centre's response remained slow and limited.
Sukhu's administration ran relief operations with its own scarce resources. The government's appeals for justice for Himalayan states forced a broader conversation: India's climate-vulnerable states cannot be left to fend for themselves.
Put these strands together and a picture emerges of a government that has not merely survived three years but has positioned itself to complete five.
However, none of this implies a flawless government. Fiscal pressure is real. After the Centre capped additional borrowing limits, the state's financial room narrowed sharply. Contractors are alleging delayed payments and stalled projects — a warning signal that the treasury is stretched.
Development bottlenecks persist in some departments. And aggressive hydropower and mining interventions in a fragile ecology demand rigorous safeguards, which must be more transparent and participatory.
Sukhu's next two years must focus on fiscal innovation, ecological prudence and institutional strengthening — otherwise the gains will remain fragile.
As Himachal observes the third anniversary of Sukhu's tenure, the lesson is not simply that the government has endured — but that it has governed with a markedly different sensibility. If Sukhu sustains this course, avoids major corruption scandals and deepens disaster preparedness, he could redefine what stable, pro-people governance looks like. The old pattern of "five years of accumulation or collapse" may finally give way to "five years of justice and resilience."
This shift matters enormously. Sukhu may or may not reshape Himachal's electoral map in 2027, but he has already reshaped the terms of governance in the mountains. And that alone makes the last three years worth a second, serious look.
