BJP swells and strides in Haryana

It is a big change for a party that was always a fringe player in Haryana, often riding piggyback on regional parties such as INLD and Haryana Vikas Party to become a junior partner in coalitions. Whenever the BJP contested an election on its own, its tally in the 90-member assembly was usually a single digit.

The reason was that, all these decades, it was confined to some urban areas. It had a small social base, and no presence among the Jats, the farming community that constitutes about 28 per cent of the electorate and matters in about 40 constituencies. The big Jat leaders — Devi Lal, Bansi Lal and, after them, Bhupendra Singh Hooda and Om Prakash Chautala — were either in the Congress or the INLD.

The BJP could not become the party of non-Jats either; that space too was occupied by the Congress. Bhajan Lal became a Congress chief minister by projecting himself as the leader of non-Jats. Of course, he also effectively used Chanakya’s policy of ‘saam, daam, danda, bhed’ to counter his rivals within the Congress as well as outside.

The BJP made an attempt to occupy the non-Jat political space by making a deal with the Haryana Janhit Party, headed by Bhajan Lal’s son Kuldeep Bishnoi, three years ago. They agreed to contest 45 assembly seats each, and that, should the alliance win, Kuldeep Bishnoi would become chief minister for the first two-and-a-half years, followed by the BJP’s turn.

They fought the Lok Sabha elections together, the BJP contesting eight seats and the HJC two. While the HJC drew a blank, with Bishnoi himself losing in Hisar, the BJP won an unprecedented seven seats and polled more than 34 per cent votes. BJP leaders attribute this to Narendra Modi’s charisma.

Big switches

No less important was the party’s success in winning over influential leaders from other parties, some of whom it fielded as candidates. The most significant was Rao Inderjit Singh, now Union Minister of State for Defence, who crossed over from the Congress. Until then, the BJP did not have a prominent Ahir leader in Ahirwal region.

Five of the BJP’s seven Lok Sabha members are neo-converts who had jumped onto the bandwagon just before the election. Now, with its eye on the assembly elections, the BJP has thrown the doors open to leaders from the Congress and the INLD. Significantly, those joining are mostly from farming communities where the BJP had little presence in the past.

Its most important gain is former CWC member and AICC general secretary Birender Singh, who joined the BJP in Amit Shah’s presence in Jind last Sunday. The Jat leader has the right pedigree: he comes from the family of Sir Chhotu Ram, founder of the Unionist Party in pre-Independence Punjab and remembered as a champion of peasants’ rights. Also, Birender is a veteran leader of four decades, with a stature unmatched by any BJP leader in the state.

In the Congress, Birender had been outsmarted and overshadowed first by Bhajan Lal and later by his own cousin Hooda. In the present situation, he could not have made much difference to the Congress’s fortunes. But in the BJP, he can become the party’s link with the Jats. This could be a game-changer.

The BJP leadership knows this. That is why when, at the Jind rally, Birender joked that he was regarded as the Congress’s tragedy king in Haryana, Amit Shah promptly assured him that the BJP won’t let any tragedy or comedy happen with him, and will treat him with honour.
Further, Shah said those joining the BJP now would become like sugar in milk. Whether that means fulfilling Birender’s unconcealed ambition to become chief minister will, of course, be known in course of time.

Weak competition

Going by history, the INLD should have been the main beneficiary of a weakening Congress racked by Hooda’s alleged acts of omission and commission. But it faces a crisis after the conviction of party president Om Prakash Chautala and his son Ajay for a fraud in recruitment of teachers. The two, along with Abhay Chautala, Om Prakash’s younger son, are also facing trial over assets disproportionate to their known sources of income.

Already, the INLD has lost successive assembly elections in 2005 and 2009. In successive Lok Sabha elections of 2004 and 2009, it drew a blank, before winning just two seats this time. After their conviction, both Om Prakash and Ajay are ineligible to contest. The INLD has still declared the former as its chief ministerial candidate, but the talk in the party is that, unless his conviction is set aside by the high court, which is set to rule soon on their appeal, Abhay will become the party leader.

The way the INLD is distributing tickets is seen as an attempt to smoothen Abhay’s way at the cost of senior partymen. This has created dissension. Some have left the party; others are planning to. And most will go to the BJP. They may not be big names, but they are influential in their areas. This suits the BJP, which does not have strong candidates in many constituencies.

Confidence

It is a measure of the BJP’s new-found confidence that Amit Shah, during his two visits to Haryana last week, lashed out at old ally Chautala for “goondagardi” in the same breath as he accused Hooda of corruption. As for the HJC, Shah said it should “understand the Lok Sabha verdict” which, in other words, means Bishnoi should scale down his ambitions and become a junior partner. Otherwise, Shah said, the BJP would contest the election on its own.

Amit Shah’s remark about Chautala, incidentally, is also a snub to Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, who heads the Akali-BJP coalition and has been an advocate of a BJP-INLD alliance in Haryana. The Akalis are an ally of the INLD in the assembly elections.