Tirath Singh Rawat stepped into active politics after he was elected president of the students' union of HNB Gharwal University, a central university now named after former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna, in early 1990s. Three decades later, the BJP MP from Gharwal, a Lok Sabha constituency earlier represented by Bahuguna and former Uttarakhand chief minister B.C. Khanduri, is taking charge as the new chief minister of Uttarakhand.
Rawat will be the ninth chief minister of the state that came into being in 2000. He has less than a year to lead his party into assembly elections due in February next year. The 46-year-old leader had won the confidence of central leadership when he was made state party president in February 2013. The BJP won all the five Lok Sabha seats in 2014.
It has been a dramatic turn of events for the leader. In 2017, he was denied a BJP ticket to contest the assembly polls as the party had accommodated all the rebel Congress leaders who had switched sides. Unhappy over the decision, Rawat had questioned the party for overlooking the contribution of committed workers. Same year, the then BJP chief Amit Shah brought Rawat into his national team as secretary.
Rawat was allotted Lok Sabha ticket from Gharwal in 2019 where he was pitted against Manish Khanduri, son of former state CM and BJP MP B.C. Khanduri. Rawat trounced Khanduri to win the seat.
As dissatisfaction brewed against former Uttarakhand CM Trivendra Singh Rawat, the BJP leadership including chief J.P. Nadda and Shah picked Tirath Singh to lead the state with less than 12 months to go for elections.
Rawat has been an active RSS pracharak since 1983, when he joined the organisation as a 19-year-old. After winning students' union elections, his role was enhanced as he assumed various responsibilities in the RSS student body ABVP. He then went on to become the party's youth wing vice president in Uttar Pradesh, as Uttarakhand was yet to be carved out.
Rawat also spent two months in jail during the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, and was active in demanding a separate state. When Uttarakhand was formed, he became the first education minister in the state BJP government.
While he was a Lok Sabha MP, he listed two private members bill including one on making yoga teaching mandatory in educational institutions. He is one of the few MPs who had 100 per cent attendance in the parliament, according to think-tank PRS Legislative.
