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Journalism of Courage
Adampur, popularly known as Mandi Adampur, is one of Haryana’s 90 Assembly constituencies and one that former Chief Minister Bhajan Lal’s family has never lost since 1968. The trend continued on Sunday when Bhajan Lal’s grandson Bhavya Bishnoi won the seat on a BJP ticket by more than 16,000 votes.
The poll became necessary after Bhavya’s father Kuldeep Bishnoi left the Congress over differences with the party and joined the ruling dispensation. But the change in political allegiance did not matter to voters as they chose to repose their faith in Bhajan Lal’s family. This is the first bypoll victory for the ruling coalition of the BJP and the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) since it came to power in 2019.
A family citadel holds
The family of the three-time former CM has never lost Adampur since 1968, irrespective of the parties they contested from. Since 1967, the Congress has registered 10 wins in Adampur. While Bhajan Lal was the party’s candidate on six occasions, his wife Jasma Devi once retained the seat for the party. After quitting the Congress in 2007, Bhajan Lal and Kuldeep floated the Haryana Janhit Congress (BL). As an HJC candidate, Kuldeep contested the 2009 Assembly polls, his wife Renuka the 2011 bypoll, and Kuldeep again in 2014. On all three occasions, they won.
In 2016, Kuldeep merged HJC (BL) with the Congress and Adampur was back with the Congress once more in the 2019 Assembly polls. But, after he was not appointed the Haryana Congress president, Kuldeep quit the party in August this year and moved to the BJP. Kuldeep’s vote share in Adampur had been increasing over the years. In 2009, he polled over 48,000 votes. This increased to over 56,000 votes in 2014, and to more than 63,000 votes in 2019.
Soon after Kuldeep Bishnoi and his family joined BJP, the saffron party was quick to declare Bhavya Bishnoi as its nominee because the party knew that it stood a better chance than others to win Adampur.
Well-designed campaign
The next Assembly polls in Haryana are due in October 2024. The bypoll gives the new MLA approximately two years. The people of Adampur wanted to be a part of the government so that their representative could push the constituency up the government’s priority list. Kuldeep Bishnoi, who represented Adampur four times, built the campaign for his son on the agenda that most of the times he won from Adampur he was in Opposition and that was why he could not bring the level of development that the constituency deserves. He managed to convince the electorate that if his son got elected he would be part of the government and ensure development for Adampur in the next two years.
Caste equations
Bhavya faced competition from three Jat candidates of the three main Opposition parties. The Congress fielded three-time MP Jai Prakash, the Indian National Lok Dal’s (INLD) candidate was Kurdaram Nambardar, and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) nominated Satender Singh. All three are Jat candidates and there is a high possibility that the Jat vote got divided among them while Bishnoi managed to consolidate the non-Jat vote bank.
Jats dominate with a maximum of 55,000 votes while the Bishnoi community’s voters number around 28,000. There are also around 26,000 Scheduled Caste (SC) voters, 29,000 voters from the Backward Classes (A) category, 4,800 Backward Classes (B) votes, around 4,000 votes of the Punjabi community, 750 Muslim voters, 1,900 Rajput votes, 75 Christian voters, and 1,000 Sikh votes.
The BJP-JJP alliance held a massive show of strength in Adampur on November 1. Led by CM Manohar Lal Khattar and Deputy CM Dushyant Chautala, the entire state Cabinet comprising the top leadership of the BJP and the JJP shared the stage and sought votes for Bhavya Bishnoi. By holding a joint rally, the two ruling parties managed to transfer their respective vote banks to the candidate. The loyalty towards the Bishnois, backed by the BJP and the JJP’s vote banks led to Bhavya’s victory. Although the BJP-JJP alliance had lost two earlier bypolls, including one in Baroda and another in Ellenabad, the BJP did not hold those two constituencies at the time of the bypolls.
Weak Opposition
Although Congress candidate Jai Prakash gave a tough fight to Bhavya Bishnoi, the party’s campaign was mainly centralised around Leader of Opposition Bhupinder Singh Hooda and his son Deepender Hooda, a Rajya Sabha MP.
No other senior Congress leader, including Randeep Surjewala, Kumari Selja and Kiran Choudhry, joined the Adampur campaign. A few Congress leaders told The Indian Express that they were not even invited to campaign in Adampur, neither by the Hoodas nor by state Congress chief Udai Bhan. Throughout the campaign in Adampur, the BJP-JJP kept hitting out at the Congress, calling it a “Bapu-Beta’s (father-son)” campaign. From the beginning, it was considered a tough contest for the Congress to break into the Bishnoi family’s citadel. Although both Bhupinder Hooda and Deepender extensively campaigned for Jai Prakash, it proved not to be enough. Jai Prakash previously unsuccessfully contested against both Bhajan Lal and Kuldeep Bishnoi and this turned out to be a defeat at the hands of the third generation of the family.
The INLD, meanwhile, declared former Congress leader Kurdaram Nambardar as its candidate within two hours of him quitting the Congress and joining the party. The INLD has one seat in Haryana’s 90-member Vidhan Sabha. Although several AAP leaders, including Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann, campaigned for AAP’s Satender Singh, he was left to fend for himself in the last days of the campaign. Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal also cancelled his rally in Adampur at the last minute.
