Haryana polls: Why Congress, despite squabbles, has an edge over BJP

Five years ago, the election results for the 90-member Haryana assembly had left everyone stumped.

With the Congress party and Om Prakash Chautala’s Indian National Lok Dal struggling against mounting internal challenges and Dushyant Chautala’s newly formed Jananayak Janata Party (JJP) yet untested, the then-ruling BJP was sitting pretty, anticipating a second comprehensive poll win.

The outcome, however, was a hung house, with the Congress registering an unexpected turnaround that brought 31 seats into its kitty and the JJP making a strong debut with 10 seats, leaving the BJP with the consolation of emerging as the single largest party with 40 seats. A hurriedly sealed post-poll pact with the JJP had then saved the day for the BJP and helped ML Khattar retain the CM’s chair while conceding the deputy chief minister’s post to Dushyant.

Five years on, as Haryana braces for its October 1 assembly election, much has changed in the Jat-dominated state’s political landscape. With anti-incumbency against his government palpable and the growing ranks of his critics within the BJP had forced the BJP to bench Khattar as the CM earlier this year and replace him with a relative greenhorn, Nayab Singh Saini.

Dwindling poll prospects

The change of guard in the state administration has, however, done little to salvage the BJP’s dwindling poll prospects in the state despite the Saini government doling out populist schemes targeting dissatisfied segments of the electorate. A confidante of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah, Khattar may have won the Lok Sabha polls and moved to the Centre as a Union minister.

Sources in the Haryana BJP, however, say he remains deeply invested in the state’s politics; often functioning as a parallel power centre against Saini and riling his intra-party critics.

With memories of the anti-farm laws agitation and the Haryana police’s crackdown against them still fresh, farmers of the state remain cold to the BJP. The agrarian Jat community, a formidable electoral force that comprises over 27 percent of the state’s population, which faced the double whammy of police excesses during the farm agitation and the BJP’s highhandedness against women wrestlers Sakshi Malik and Vinesh Phogat (both Jats) who protested against their alleged sexual harassment by former BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh has been consolidating behind the Congress.

The controversial disqualification of Vinesh Phogat from the Paris Olympics after she had reached the finals in the 50 kg wrestling category and the BJP-led central government’s perceived failure in ensuring a strong defence for her at the CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sports) hearing have, expectedly, been milked by the Congress for building an emotive electoral narrative.

With unemployment spiralling in the once prosperous state, the BJP has also been struggling to contain discontent among jobless youth by announcing and expediting recruitment drives for filling up vacancies across government departments, which the Congress claims stand at over 2 lakh. As per the Haryana government’s own data, there are over 4.5 lakh unemployed youth in the state while the Saini government has set a target of filling up just 50000 vacancies by August-end.

The Congress has, for the past three months, been alleging that the Saini government is in a minority. The BJP had lost its alliance partner, the JJP, ahead of the Lok Sabha polls while three independent legislators who were previously supporting the state government have moved into the Congress’s fold.

The Centre’s restraint against announcing any tailor-made sops for Haryana in the recently announced Union Budget, which could have pacified disgruntled sections of the state’s electorate, have only aggravated the BJP’s challenges.

Multiple challenges

With troubles stacking up against it, the BJP has to fight battles on multiple fronts if it hopes to return to power for a third consecutive term when the Haryana assembly poll results are declared on October 4. Its only solace, as of now, is that the Congress, despite the socio-political narrative in the state tilted in its favour, has failed to set its deeply fragmented house in order even after repeated interventions by the party’s central leadership.

The Lok Sabha poll results in June had projected a huge surge in the Congress’s popularity in the state. Having failed to win a single seat from the state in the 2019 general elections, the Congress had surged ahead to bag five of Haryana’s nine Lok Sabha seats it contested (the party had left one seat – Kurukshetra- to INDIA bloc ally Aam Aadmi Party, which was won by the BJP). The Congress also registered an impressive vote share of 43.67 percent; up from the 28.51 percent it had bagged five years earlier but still marginally lower than the BJP’s 46.11 percent (the saffron party had polled over 58 percent of the votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha election).

However, despite the visible uptick in its poll prospects, the Congress lost its senior leader and five-term MLA, Kiran Chaudhary to the polls soon after the Lok Sabha results. Chaudhary had been upset over the Congress high command’s failure to rein in her intra-party rival and former two-term state CM, Bhupinder Singh Hooda – a grouse she shares with several senior leaders who remain in the Congress even now.

Hooda’s insistence of having complete control over the party in Haryana has led to frequent showdowns between him and other Congress veterans of the state; among them, Sirsa MP and Dalit leader Kumari Selja, former Union ministers Birender Singh and his son Brijendra Singh (the two quit the BJP to return to the Congress just ahead of the Lok Sabha polls), former MLA Ajay Singh Yadav and Rajya Sabha MP Randeep Surjewala.

Confident Congress

A meeting convened by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge to review the party’s poll preparations for Haryana earlier this week, sources say, ended in a bitter verbal spat between Selja and Haryana Congress chief Udai Bhan, a Hooda loyalist. A senior Congress leader told The Federal that though Kharge and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi have repeatedly urged Hooda and his rivals with the party to look past their personal differences and work unitedly for the party, the two sides remain daggers drawn.

After the Election Commission announced the poll schedule for Haryana, on Friday (August 16), Selja told The Federal, “We are confident of winning the elections with an absolute majority but I have always maintained that if we have to come to power, we have to all work together. This is also the instruction of the high command. I can only hope that other senior leaders of the party will do as the high command has wished.”

A key reason behind the Congress high command’s inability to force Hooda into falling in line is the fact that he remains not just widely popular among the state’s Jat electorate but also among section of the non-Jats, particularly the Dalits and Muslims. The Congress also believes, that the loss of seats it suffered in 2019 due to a fragmentation of the Jat vote between the Congress, the JJP and the INLD, will not recur in the upcoming election.

“The INLD has failed to revive itself ever since Dushyant split the party to form the JJP. Now even the JJP is struggling because Dushyant waited too long to sever ties with the BJP. He did nothing to stop the anti-farmer decisions of the Khattar government in the state and did not speak out against the Centre’s farm laws because he wanted to remain deputy CM for as long as he could. That he has lost the support he got in 2019 from the Jats and even non-Jat farmers was evident in the washout of his party in the Lok Sabha polls and we think though he may recover slightly in the assembly polls, it won’t be enough to cause any major damage to the Congress,” a senior Haryana Congress MLA said.

The Congress is also confident that the “high anti-incumbency” against the BJP in the state will ensure a rout of the saffron party even though the Lok Sabha poll results showed the BJP leading in 44 of the state’s assembly segments against the Congress’s 42.

Buoyant over the Lok Sabha outcome, Hooda and even his detractors in the party, said sources, want the Congress to contest on all 90 seats of the state instead of rekindling the alliance with the AAP, which had failed to win the Kurukshetra seat but managed to register a lead in four of its assembly segments. Congress leaders assert that the “votes AAP polled were on account of the Congress” and that Arvind Kejriwal’s party “has no base of its own” in the state. “By having an alliance with the AAP, we will only be ceding our ground to them at a time when we are fully confident of wresting power on our own,” a Congress Lok Sabha MP from the state told The Federal.

Whether the Congress is being confident or overconfident in its estimation of Haryana’s poll pitch is difficult to predict at the moment. What is clear though is that despite having its fair share of internal challenges, the party seems to be better equipped to take on the BJP at the hustings, owing to the saffron party’s own failures.

The BJP, it is expected, will rely on Modi and Shah to perk up the party’s poll campaign. Can the duo deliver against such mounting odds?