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Journalism of Courage
At Badopatti village on the Hisar-Ambala National Highway, Rohtas Guri talks about how he had to spend three-four days just to get details in his ‘Parivar Pehchan Patra’ corrected.
“I am from the Kumhar community, but in the family ID, the caste of two of my three children was mentioned as Chamar. I lost earnings of three-four days making the rounds of offices to get this corrected,” says Guri, who works as a carpenter.
Before that, the 45-year-old says, he had to similarly approach different officials to correct his family income to Rs 1.4 lakh annually, from Rs 2 lakh. Only those families with an annual income of Rs 1.8 lakh or less can avail several welfare schemes in the state, such as 2 litres of mustard oil monthly.
While Guri remains a “BJP supporter”, the ambitious Parivar Pehchan Patra of the BJP government in Haryana in 2020 is a contentious issue and now one of the main planks of the opposition Congress.
Under the scheme, launched by then Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, the 54-lakh odd families in Haryana were to get a unique eight-digit identification number each, to ease distribution of social security schemes and their monitoring by the state government. It was made mandatory for all families to register on the Parivar Pehchan Patra portal, with state employees warned that their salaries could be withheld if they failed to do so.
The Congress opposed the family ID plan right from the start, dubbing it ‘Permanent Pareshani (Harassment) Patra’, and calling it a violation of the right to privacy. With public complaints suggesting a high rate of inaccuracy in family IDs, the party promised as far back as 2023 that the Congress would scrap the scheme if voted to power in the Assembly polls later this year.
Congress MLA B B Batra has talked about all the different problems with the cards, starting from the fact that “one has to fill 25 columns” to get one.
“The very first column is Aadhaar. A nine-judge Supreme Court judgment said Aadhaar card is not mandatory. The judgment said the right to privacy is a fundamental right. How can the state then ask for my Aadhaar number? Another column asks for caste. Social security benefits are given from the Consolidated Fund of the State, and don’t require the beneficiary’s caste. If the government wants a caste census, it should be done as per proper legal procedures,” Batra said.
Radheshyam Tak, a Kumhar from the same Badopatti village as Guri, says that he is a mason and, usually after he completes a work, payment to him and other workers under him gets transferred to his bank account. “This means my annual income shows up as Rs 4 lakh in my Parivar Pehchan Patra, and my name has been deleted from the list of ration beneficiaries. Despite all efforts, I have not been able to correct this,” Tak says.
Adds the father of four, “Such problems have boosted the Congress in our village, which otherwise would have voted in bulk for the BJP. The party will still get votes, but it is because of (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi, not the BJP Haryana government.”
The Badopatti village falls in the Hisar Lok Sabha seat, where the BJP’s Ranjit Singh Chautala, a former Independent MLA and state Power Minister, is pitted against the Congress’s Jai Prakash, a former Union minister.
The Kumhars, along with a few other OBCs, are seen as staunch BJP supporters, while the Congress is hoping for a major chunk of the Scheduled Caste and Jat votes. The Jats are the single biggest group in the constituency, and while Chautala belongs to the first family of the community in Haryana, the Devi Lal clan, on the other side is the Congress’s formidable Jat leader, Bhupinder Singh Hooda.
The BJP will hope to make up for any loss of Jat vote with that of Hindu Punjabis and Brahmins, especially in Hisar town.
Almost the same issues and caste equations exist in the Kurukshetra constituency, where Congress-backed Aam Aadmi Party candidate Sushil Gupta is taking on the BJP’s Naveen Jindal, a two-time former Congress MP from the seat.
In Kyodak village, a Jhimar community member, Samay Singh, recalls how the Congress government in Haryana gave free residential plots to the poor. Singh, who sells juice from a cart on the Hisar-Ambala highway, adds: “In the BJP government, I could not even get a loan for the construction of my home. This time, there is a wave for the Congress in Haryana.”
In Ambala, the epicentre of the continuing farmer agitation in Haryana against the BJP government, the BJP has fielded the late Union minister Rattan Lal Kataria’s wife Banto Kataria.
While Modi still may prove a stronger factor when it comes to polling day, a farmer in Ambala’s Balana village, Nayab Singh Chahal, 65, says: “The BJP will pay a price for the lathicharge and firing on agitating farmers in February this year.”
Hisar Congress leader and six-time former MLA Sampat Singh says farmers too are suffering on account of family IDs. “If a farmer gets an online payment of Rs 3 lakh for his crops, it appears as his income. This is wrong as it does not take into account the huge input costs. Similarly, if a person repays a loan of Rs 3 lakh to someone, it gets recorded as the income of the person.”
“There are so many formalities and web portals involved that a family member has to be dedicated just to update all the required documents,” Sampat jokes.
Haryana BJP spokesperson Sanjay Sharma says every new scheme has teething problems, and that the government has been continuously improving it. “The Congress is making it an issue as it doesn’t want corruption to end.”
Khattar accuses “the Opposition of seeing things through tinted glasses”. In a speech in the state Assembly in August 2023, the then CM said Aadhaar had taken over six years to achieve a mass scale and integration with schemes, while his government’s Parivar Pehchan Patra had done so in just over two years.
“The scheme is aimed at easing access to welfare schemes and we have already implemented a lot of things under it,” he said. “There is no going back now.”
