Arya first entered the Uttarakhand Legislative Assembly in 2002, winning the Gangolihat seat as a Congress candidate by defeating BJP's Jogaram Tamta with a margin of 470 votes.
[3] In the 2007 assembly elections, Arya lost to BJP candidate Joga Ram by 2,790 votes.
He regained the seat in 2012, defeating BJP's Geeta Thakur, and was again appointed as a cabinet minister in the Congress government.
However, in the 2017 elections, he lost to BJP's Meena Gangola by a margin of 805 votes.
In 2022, he left the Congress after being denied a ticket and decided to contest as an independent candidate from Gangolihaat but he later withdrew his candidature and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party.