Haryana polls: Lack of unity among Congress leaders can 'throw away certain victory'

The Congress party’s age-old affliction of simmering factional feuds among its leaders with unbridled ambitions has kept it from finalising candidates for the Haryana assembly polls on October 5.

The party’s screening committee tasked with finalising dockets – three to four shortlisted candidates per segment – for the state’s 90 assembly constituencies has been unable to finish its job despite several meetings over the past week.

Sources privy to the discussions told The Federal that the committee, headed by party treasurer and Rajya Sabha MP Ajay Maken, has failed to evolve a consensus between former CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda and his intra-party rivals on “even names of potential candidates for several constituency-wise dockets”.

Deep divisions

The anti-Hooda camp, which practically includes all senior leaders of the state – Sirsa MP Kumari Selja, Rajya Sabha MP Randeep Singh Surjewala, former Union minister Birender Singh and AICC’s OBC department chief Capt Ajay Singh Yadav, believes the former two-term CM, his son and Rohtak MP Deepender Hooda and their loyalist, PCC chief Udai Bhan, have “colluded with Deepak Babaria (the Congress’s in-charge for Haryana) to ensure that a majority of tickets are given to the Hooda camp”.

With barely four days remaining before notification for the Haryana polls is issued, sources said Maken and Babaria could now seek the party high command’s intervention to “break the stalemate” in the candidate selection process.

The deepening acrimony within the Haryana Congress comes at a time when all internal pre-poll surveys conducted by the party and agencies that work in collaboration with media channels have predicted a clear victory for the Congress in the state that it had last won in 2009.

That there are deep divisions in the Haryana Congress has always been known but the Congress high command has been unable to rein in its warring satraps. Congress leaders believe that the prospect of returning to power in the state after a decade owing to massive anti-incumbency against Haryana’s ruling BJP regime has only exacerbated this infighting.

Congress riding high

The Congress, despite its internal feuds, has been riding high in Haryana since the June Lok Sabha polls when it bagged five of the nine constituencies it contested and an overall vote share of over 43 per cent.

The party secured leads across 42 assembly segments of the state, just marginally behind the BJP, which led in 44 assembly seats. Congress insiders, however, assert that the party would have led in over 50 assembly segments had it, like the BJP, fielded candidates in all 10 Lok Sabha constituencies of the state instead of ceding the Kurukshetra constituency to its INDIA bloc ally, Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP.

The Congress is going into the upcoming polls without any alliance, much like the BJP.

The state’s two regional parties, Dushyant Chautala’s Jananayak Janta Party (JJP) and his grandfather Om Prakash Chautala’s Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) – both now struggling to remain politically relevant – have allied with Chandrashekhar Azad’s Azad Samaj Party (ASP) and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), respectively, in the hope of wooing Haryana’s Dalit community that constitutes over 20 per cent of the population.

The alliances of the JJP and the INLD, notwithstanding, many believe the electoral battle in the state is predominantly a bipolar one between the Congress and the BJP, with the latter hemmed in by seemingly insurmountable odds.

Lack of unity

The anger among the largely agrarian Jat community against the BJP for its anti-farmer policies and the high-handedness of the party’s central leadership against Jat women wrestlers, who had accused former BJP MP Brij Bhushan Singh of sexual harassment coupled with issues of rising unemployment, economic stagnation and communal unrest, have collectively given the Congress hopes of an easy victory.

Yet, state Congress leaders point out that the visible lack of unity among its factional heads and the central leadership’s failure to read the riot act to them could “throw away certain victory”.

Pro-Hooda vs anti-Hooda claims

Hooda supporters claim that none of the Jat leader’s rivals have a mass base and Selja, Surjewala, Ajay Yadav and Birender Singh can “at best ensure victory of five or six candidates loyal to them” in districts where they claim their respective clout.

“There are only two leaders in Haryana Congress who enjoy a base across Haryana and they are Bhupinder Hooda and Deepender Hooda... all 36 biradaris (communities) of the state believe in their leadership. Selja’s influence is limited to some Dalit reserved seats while Birender Singh’s clout is limited to Hisar and is no longer what it used to be; as for Surjewala, he is a leader only because he flaunts his proximity to Rahul Gandhi, otherwise he can’t even win the election from Kaithal (the assembly seat Surjewala represented in 2009 and 2014 before losing it in 2019 shortly after suffering a crushing bypoll defeat from Jind the same year),” a Congress MLA loyal to Hooda said.

Hooda’s detractors, on the other hand, assert that the near vertical split in the Haryana Congress is entirely because the former CM – and current leader of Opposition in the state Assembly – “wants absolute control over every aspect of the party”, including selection of candidates and campaign strategy so that if the Congress wins a majority, he can return as CM for a third term.

Sources close to Selja and Surjewala told The Federal that the two leaders believe it was “at Hooda’s behest” that Babaria recently announced to the media that “no sitting MP will be given permission” to contest the upcoming polls. If the party enforces this rule, it would directly rule out Selja and Surjewala’s candidature.

Not one-sided

It is learnt that Babaria’s statement before the press triggered a strong backlash from Selja and Surjewala, the former, a confidant of Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi and the latter known as a Rahul Gandhi confidant, who, sources said, “immediately informed the high command that the state in-charge is acting with bias”.

A reprimand from the central leadership first made Babaria dilute his statement to say that party leaders who have not contested the polls could also “throw their hat in the ring” to bag the CM’s post if the party won and later issue a further clarification stating “sitting MPs can contest the polls if they have the permission of the high command”.

Congress insiders claim that the challenge before the party’s candidate screening committee is to ensure that “ticket distribution isn’t one-sided”. “It is not just about which leader gets more seats in his quota but also about managing caste equations. Hooda is our tallest Jat leader and there is no doubt that he is also our best bet to lead the campaign because of his mass base but if you look at the history of Haryana elections, the Congress has never come to power only because of support of the Jats,” a member of the screening committee said.

The committee member added, “to have a comfortable victory we need a solid combination of Jat, Dalit and Muslim votes which can take on the BJP’s current social arithmetic of consolidating Brahmins, Punjabis, Bishnois, Ahirs and other smaller caste groups... we are not worried about Jats and Muslims because Hooda is popular in both communities but consolidating Dalits could be a problem if we sideline Selja, our most prominent Dalit face in the state, and think the community will vote en masse for us only because we have a Dalit PCC chief (Udai Bhan)... both INLD and JJP have BSP and ASP (respectively); if the Dalit vote splits, it is the BJP that will have a natural advantage”.

Congress selection criteria

Sources said the party’s central election committee, which has to finalise candidates from names shortlisted by the screening committee, will meet “in the next 48 hours”.

A possible approach that the party is considering to bring some semblance of a bi-partisan approach in candidate selection is to deny tickets to any aspirant who had lost both the 2014 and 2019 polls as well as to those who may have won previously but had lost their deposits in the 2019 election. Additionally, the party could widen its social engineering in ticket distribution by reducing over-reliance on Jat candidates and accommodating candidates from other communities that previously went “under-represented” in the Congress’s candidate selection.

Sources said if these criteria are implemented it would “automatically reduce the share of Hooda loyalists”, as the former CM got a lion’s share of tickets for his supporters in the 2014 and 2019 polls and is also known to bank heavily on Jat candidates.

A senior party leader also said that a call on whether Selja and Surjewala will be permitted to contest the election will now be taken by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Lok Sabha’s leader of Opposition, Rahul Gandhi.

It is likely that the party may convince Surjewala to withdraw from the contest and instead field his son, Aditya Surjewala, from Kaithal. Several senior Congress leaders, including at least one sitting Lok Sabha MP and another leader who narrowly lost the Lok Sabha polls, have also been assured that their son or daughter will be made candidates.

Selja, however, remains keen on contesting the assembly polls; something that Hooda is stridently opposed to. And, soThe internal feud rages on.