Haryana Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala has gone by the dictum: strike when the iron is hot. His decision to advance elections to the State Assembly by 17 months is with a view to cashing in on the popularity he thinks the Indian National Lok Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance enjoys. It is the prerogative of a Chief Minister who enjoys majority support in the House to choose a date of his choice for holding polls and no one should deny Chautala that right. He is enthused by the spectacular performance of the coalition in the recent Lok Sabha elections when it won all the 10 seats in the State. He also feels that any delay on his part could prove costly as political popularity is often ephemeral. Hence his eagerness to go back to the voters. For once, he cannot be found fault with his decision is in the best democratic tradition.Of course, it is common knowledge that the majority he enjoyed in the dissolved House had more to do with his manoeuvring skills than his grassroots support. In fact, in thelast assembly elections Chau-tala's party had received a severe drubbing at the hands of the Haryana Vikas Party of Bansi Lal and the BJP, which had a pre-poll alliance. His opportunity came two and a half years later when the BJP fell out with Bansi Lal. However, in the best aaya-Ram-gaya-Ram traditions of the state, it did not take long for a majority of the HVP MLAs to join the Chautala bandwagon. In terms of numbers, Chautala might have been unassailable in the House but political legitimacy continued to elude him. The voters who were kept aloof as political parties played football with democracy for instance, the Congress propped up the Bansi Lal Ministry only to pull it down within a couple of weeks can now decide their own destiny. To that extent at least, Chautala's decision is welcome. But to assume that Chautala is confidence personified is not to know him at all. For all his bombast of returning to power with better majority support in the House, he found it necessary to announce quite a fewsops to the voters as a prelude to the decision. In doing so, he showed greater awareness of the electoral code of conduct than the perilous condition of the state exchequer. Needless to say, this does not speak highly of his confidence to retain the kind of support the ruling combine had in the Lok Sabha election. Haryana is one state where Kargil had a tremendous impact on the voters. This itself is a matter of deep worry for Chautala. The Chief Minister has promised free and fair elections, the need for which cannot be overemphasised in the light of the mayhem he enacted at Meham when as Chief Minister he contested a by-election there in the early nineties. Given the state of his party's relations with the BJP, sharing of seats may not be very difficult. That the two parties are dependent on each other for their political survival is the best cementing force. But all these calculations can go awry, as Kerala Chief Minister E.K. Nayanar once realised. In 1991, he advanced the elections only to find K.Karunakaran replacing him as Chief Mini-ster. Which only goes to show that voters cannot ever be taken for granted.
