Haryana: Another wasted election sets stage for more mud-slinging in Congress

Belying predictions made by ground reports and every single exit poll, the BJP looks set to romp home to power in Haryana for a third consecutive term. By 7 pm on Tuesday (October 8), the saffron party had won 47 seats and was leading in one of the state’s 90 Assembly seats. The Congress, widely expected to win the state after a decade of BJP rule, had won 36 seats and was leading in one as well.

Expected reaction from Congress

The unexpected results have been expectedly met with shock within the Congress, which, as it has been the party’s practice following poll defeats for the past decade, blamed the BJP’s triumph on a “win of the system, of manipulation and of subverting of public sentiment”. Dubbing the Haryana result as a “defeat of democracy”, Congress’s communications chief Jairam Ramesh told reporters that his party “rejects the verdict” and was contemplating ways of challenging the counting process and the outcome before the Election Commission.

The shock and horror that the results have unleashed on the Congress aren’t surprising and nor is its reaction to the electoral outcome. For months, the Congress had been leading an aggressive campaign in the state, riding high on a revival of fortunes as evidenced in the June Lok Sabha poll results when the party bagged five of the state’s 10 seats (it had contested nine), and a palpable anti-incumbency sentiment driven by agitations by Jats, farmers, women wrestlers, and factors such as spiralling unemployment and a visible collapse of law and order.

Also read: Steering the BJP juggernaut in Haryana, Saini emerges as a rising star

Yet another election thrown away

As the results rolled in on Tuesday, it was clear that these indicators didn’t reflect voter sentiment. The BJP not only managed to return with a majority but also with a vote share of 39.94 per cent against the Congress’s 39.09 per cent (at 7 pm). The Congress, according to Ramesh, will now look for ways to challenge the results while also looking inwards; setting up yet another committee in true Congress style to examine the causes of yet another poll debacle.

No one knows how these plans of the party will pan out or what their outcome would do to alter the reality of another election thrown away. What is predictable though, with signs already evident on the Congress grapevine, is that the electoral jolt would trigger a storm within the Congress — at the central and the state level — with factional leaders deflecting the blame on one another for the defeat.

Open season for mud-slinging

Had the Congress actually won the polls, its challenge would have been largely limited to deciding who its chief minister in the state would be and then of how to balance the aspirations of its other factional leaders. The defeat though makes it an open season for mud-slinging while the Congress gears up for challenging poll contests in Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Delhi.

Sirsa MP Kumari Selja, the Congress’s most prominent Dalit leader from Haryana, has already expressed shock at the result while making barely veiled references to the defeat being driven by the party’s failure to rein in her intra-party arch-rival, Bhupinder Singh Hooda. Selja’s remark that the Congress high command must “act against those who are responsible for the defeat” has widely been seen as a jibe at Hooda, imploring the leadership to hold the Jat satrap to account.

Also read: Haryana polls: 4 factors that may have upset Congress’s apple cart

Hooda’s overconfidence

Hooda, the leader of Opposition in Haryana, had been the undisputed showrunner of the Congress’s campaign and, much to the chagrin of his detractors such as Selja, Randeep Surjewala, Ajay Singh Yadav, and Birender Singh, got as many as 72 candidates of his choice in the state.

Throughout Tuesday, as the BJP’s leads expanded, Hooda maintained the Congress “will form the government with an absolute majority” while his supporters across Haryana blamed the “tantra” (system) and “prashasan” (administration) of slowing down the counting process to give an impression of a BJP win being imminent. It was only around 6 pm that Hooda finally conceded defeat while asserting that the results “do not reflect the public mood”.

The Jat factor

Speculations on what went wrong for the Grand Old Party have begun to swirl; some plausible, others not so much. Congress leaders claim a huge reason for the “disappointing results” was the BJP’s success in consolidating non-Jat votes across the state against the Jat-Muslim consolidation that the Congress and Hooda had worked towards.

Woven into this Jat-versus-non-Jat binary was the message by a section of Congress leaders that by letting Hooda project himself as the chief minister-in-waiting through the campaign (though he maintained that the final decision would be the high command’s) the party leadership alienated Dalits and OBCs who weren’t enamoured by the thought of Jat dominance once again in Haryana’s power corridors.

Watch: Haryana poll analysis: Congress’s missed opportunities and reasons for setback

Alienated Dalits

That Selja did not campaign aggressively for the party, especially after the Congress leadership failed to rein in Hooda’s supporters who regularly and publicly insulted the Sirsa MP, arguably, put the BJP at an advantage by consolidating a chunk of the Dalits back into its fold after the community decisively swerved towards the Congress during the Lok Sabha polls.

Of the 16 Scheduled Caste reserved seats in Haryana, a state with a 22 per cent Dalit population, the Congress bagged nine while seven went to the BJP. In another dozen seats with a sizeable Dalit population, Congress leaders said the BJP won at least eight.

What did not work for Congress

After meting out a shoddy treatment to Selja through much of the campaign, Congress’s last-minute efforts to win back the confidence of the Dalit community by getting party president Mallikarjun Kharge, a Dalit himself, to address various rallies and press conferences, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi to go on a “yatra” through Dalit-dominated areas such as Ambala and Kharkhauda and even engineering the surprise return of Dalit leader Ashok Tanwar into the Congress on the eve of the elections did not pay the electoral dividends the party had hoped for.

Congress insiders also admitted that party leader Rahul Gandhi’s strident caste census and “Save Constitution” push did not resonate with the OBCs in Haryana who remained firmly behind the BJP — more so since the saffron party picked Nayab Singh Saini, a backward caste leader, as its CM earlier this year.

Furthermore, the over-reliance on Jat leader Hooda and the caste census/social justice pitch appeared to have pushed the forward classes — Brahmins, Banias, and Punjabi Khatris — further towards the BJP.

Congress hit by bad choices

The Congress also seems to have been hit badly by its own bad choices. Under pressure from Hooda, it chose to stick to its "sitting-getting" formula and renominated nearly all its sitting MLAs for the elections. As many as 15 of those incumbent MLAs lost the polls.

Additionally, the party leadership's failure to say a firm "no" to Hooda on his choice of candidates as well as the interference of a powerful AICC leader close to Rahul for getting tickets for a couple of his "favourites" has boomeranged spectacularly. In over half a dozen such seats, Congress workers who had been working hard for the past five years in the hope of becoming party candidates were left with no choice but to enter the poll fray as rebels; almost all of them polled more votes than the margin of the Congress’s defeat in such seats.