Out of 5 Lok Sabha MPs, Haryana to get 3 Union ministers

While Khattar, 70, was the Haryana chief minister till March 12 when he was replaced by Nayab Singh Saini, Gurgaon MP-elect Rao Inderjit Singh, 74, and Faridabad MP-elect Krishan Pal Gurjar, 67, were Union ministers in the previous Modi governments too.

Khattar has been elected for the first time from the Karnal Lok Sabha seat while Singh is the only politician from Haryana who has reached the Lok Sabha for a record sixth time. Singh’s supporters have been projecting him as the next chief minister of the state if the saffron party is voted to power in the Assembly elections.

For Gurjar, this would be his third term from the Faridabad Lok Sabha seat. A transport minister during the Haryana Vikas Party-BJP alliance government led by the then chief minister Bansi Lal from 1996 to 1999, Gurjar later served as president of Haryana BJP.

Manohar Lal Khattar

When Khattar was chosen to become the first chief minister of a BJP government in Haryana after the party won an election on its own in 2019, he was considered a dark horse in political circles. In March this year, in a surprise move, the party replaced Khattar with Saini for the CM’s post.

Khattar was fielded from the Karnal constituency in the recent Lok Sabha elections and he won by an impressive margin of 2,32,577 votes.

As chief minister, Khattar is credited with trying to ensure recruitment for government jobs through a transparent system and online transfer of government employees, especially teachers. However, the Opposition criticised him for introducing “complicated” family IDs (Parivar Pehchan Patras) and several web portals, especially one which made it mandatory for the farmers to upload details of their crops on a government website.

Farmers also staged several protests against him when the police took action against those agitating against three central farm laws in 2020-21, and against farmers, especially from Punjab, taking part in a ‘Dilli Chalo’ protest call in February this year.

Khattar belongs to a Hindu Punjabi family that migrated to India during the Partition. According to BJP sources, after the Partition, his father bought a small piece of agricultural land and took up farming in Banyani village in Haryana. As a school-going kid, Khattar used to assist his father in farming – from sowing seeds to selling the produce in markets to earn a living. His aspiration to become a doctor brought him to New Delhi for higher education. He completed his graduation from Delhi University and ventured into the cloth business at a young age.

As a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) pracharak, he travelled to different corners of the state. His first assignment as a pracharak was at Faridabad, followed by tenures at Rohtak, Jagadhri, Yamunanagar, Karnal, Kurukshetra, Hisar and Bhiwani. His long stint as an RSS pracharak provided him an insight into the problems of people across all sections of society.

Khattar served as the general secretary (organisation) of the Haryana BJP from 1994 to 2004 before being elevated as zonal organising secretary of the party for Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh and Haryana.

When he was the chairman of the election campaign committee for the Lok Sabha elections in Haryana in 2014, the BJP romped home to a resounding victory winning seven of the eight seats it contested.

Rao Inderjit Singh

A six-time MP and four-time MLA, Singh is a former Congress heavyweight who switched to the BJP ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Singh is a descendant of Rao Tula Ram, the 19th-century king of the Ahirwal region that comprises Rewari, Mahendragarh, Gurgaon and parts of Bhiwani, Dadri, Nuh and Jhajjar in Haryana and Alwar in Rajasthan.

His father Rao Birender Singh had served as Haryana’s second chief minister in 1967 and formed a party, Vishal Haryana Party, which was later merged with the Congress.

Singh has been a minister of state (MoS) in two Modi ministries and was the MoS defence and external affairs in the UPA government.

Born in Rampura, Singh graduated from Delhi University’s Hindu College and went on to get a law degree before joining politics at the age of 26. He made his Assembly poll debut from Rewari’s Jatusana on a Vishal Haryana Party ticket.

Apart from politics, Singh is an avid shooter and has gone on to become a member of the Indian shooting team and secured three gold medals at the South Asian Federation Games. According to his affidavit this year, he has assets worth Rs 121.7 crore, a three-fold jump from his declared assets in the last election.

This time, Singh won with a low margin of 75,079 votes, a far cry from the 3.86 lakh vote margin he secured in 2019. Singh bagged a vote share of 50.48 per cent.

Krishan Pal Gurjar

In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Gurjar polled over 7.8 lakh votes and defeated Congress’s Mahender Pratap Singh in Faridabad by a margin of nearly 1.73 lakh votes. In 2019, he won the parliamentary polls by a margin of 6.38 lakh votes, which was the third-biggest victory margin in the Lok Sabha elections then.

Before being elected to the Lok Sabha from Faridabad in 2014, Gurjar held the responsibility of Haryana BJP chief from 2009 to 2013.

Born on February 4, 1957, in Mewla Maharajpur in Faridabad, Gurjar’s early life was rooted in his hometown. He pursued his higher education by completing graduation from Jawaharlal Nehru College in 1978, followed by a law degree from Meerut University. He joined politics during his college days and in 1994, he was elected as a councillor in the Faridabad Municipal Corporation.

Just two years later, he was elected to the Haryana Assembly when he defeated senior politician Mahender Pratap Singh from Mewla Maharajpur constituency. He was then made a Cabinet minister in the BJP-Haryana Vikas Party alliance government led by Bansi Lal.

In 2000, he defeated Mahender Pratap Singh again and became the leader of the BJP legislative group in the Vidhan Sabha. In 2009, he was elected from the Tigaon Assembly constituency.