Haryana polls | No seats for Selja, and Randeep Surjewala? Suspense continues

After days of hectic parleys, the Congress party released its first list of candidates for the October 5 Haryana Assembly polls late Friday (September 6) night. Though Deepak Babaria, the Congress’s Haryana in-charge, told reporters that the party’s election committee had, so far, cleared the names of as many as 71 candidates for the 90-member Haryana assembly, only 32 nominees were announced Friday night.

The list had no surprises, as 30 of the 32 candidates declared by the party, including Congress’s current legislative party chief Bhupinder Singh Hooda, are incumbent MLAs. Vinesh Phogat, who had joined the Congress earlier in the day along with fellow Olympian Bajrang Punia, has been picked by the party to make her electoral debut from the Julana assembly constituency in Jind district.

Punia could be star campaigner

Punia’s name, however, did not figure in the list of candidates amid indications by a section of the party’s Haryana leadership that though he remains a ticket contender, there is a possibility that the Congress may choose to use him as a campaigner for the upcoming polls. The party also named Punia, a vocal supporter of the farmers’ protest against the ruling BJP at the Centre and in Haryana, as the working chairman of the All India Kisan Congress.

The only candidate to feature in the list, aside from Phogat, who isn’t an incumbent MLA, is Udai Bhan, chief of the Congress’s Haryana unit and a close aide of Hooda. Bhan will contest from the Scheduled Caste reserved Hodal seat in Palwal district. Bhan had won Hodal in 2014 by defeating the BJP’s Jagdish Nayar. In the 2019 polls, Bhan narrowly lost the seat to Nayar by just over 3300 votes.

The party has also decided to re-nominate its MLA Mewa Singh as the candidate from the Ladwa, which the BJP has picked for Haryana CM Nayab Singh Saini.

No seat for Hooda's detractors?

Congress sources said a second list featuring another batch of 35-odd nominees may be declared over the weekend while the CEC is still in the process of evolving consensus among its various factional leaders from the state over potential contenders for the remaining seats.

Babaria said the party high command had not taken any call so far on whether the party should field some of its incumbent MPs as candidates in the Assembly poll. Babaria’s statement is significant as prominent Bhupinder Hooda detractors, Sirsa MP Kumari Selja and Rajya Sabha MP Randeep Surjewala, have both been lobbying for tickets for themselves. While Selja has made no secret of her desire to switch to state politics after having spent decades in national politics, Surjewala, sources said, is amenable to the idea of the party fielding his son, Aditya Surjewala, from his traditional seat of Kaithal instead.

The Congress's list came amid indications from the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party that their negotiations for a pre-poll alliance in the state had hit a stalemate. A Congress leader involved in the discussions with the AAP told The Federal that an alliance between the parties now seemed “very unlikely”. The leader said that while the “entire state leadership” of the party was “strongly opposed” to any alliance, the AAP was also “unwilling to accept any deal” that offered it fewer than 15 seats.

AAP demand shot down

Congress sources had earlier told The Federal that the party was not in the mood to cede more than three to seven seats to the AAP even though party leader Rahul Gandhi had asked his colleagues to “explore the possibility” of an alliance not just with Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal’s outfit but also with other INDIA bloc constituents such as Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, Sharad Pawar’s NCP and the Left’s CPI and CPM. Though AAP MP Raghav Chaddha, the main negotiator for his party, told reporters on Friday that “every effort” was being made to seal an alliance with the Congress, AAP sources said the party was “prepared to go solo” if the stalemate continues till Sunday.

The last date for candidates to file their nominations for the Haryana polls is September 12. Sources in both Congress and the AAP said that the alliance talks began “very late” and that there was “hardly any time left now to have meaningful discussions on seat-sharing”. Interestingly, the impasse in the Congress-AAP talks came on a day when Rajendra Pal Gautam, a former minister in Kejriwal’s Delhi government and AAP’s prominent Dalit leader, joined the Congress.

Addressing a press conference at the Congress headquarters shortly after being inducted into the party, Gautam accused the AAP leadership of being “not sincere about the rights and issues of the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, backward castes and, especially, the minorities”. Though AAP sources maintained that the breakdown in the alliance talks with the Congress had “nothing to do with Gautam’s joining”, the AAP was “not happy” about the Congress’s platform being used to “level baseless allegations against our party and leadership”.

What The Left says

Meanwhile, sources in the SP and the Left parties confirmed to The Federal that they were no longer negotiating for a tie-up with the Congress but would “fully support the party” to ensure the BJP’s defeat in the state. “Whether we are given a seat or not in the alliance is not important; what is important is that the party or candidate best placed to defeat the BJP should be strengthened and we understand that that party in Haryana today is the Congress,” a senior SP leader said.

Rahul Gandhi’s last-minute missive for exploring the chance of a pre-poll pact with other INDIA bloc parties had caught many in his party by surprise as the Congress’s Haryana leadership, despite being deeply divided over individual political ambitions, was unanimous in the view that the party was set for a comfortable victory against the BJP on its own.

Sources said that while the Congress’s Sirsa MP Kumari Selja and Rajya Sabha MP Randeep Surjewala had opposed the idea of an alliance with the AAP almost as soon as it was mooted, Hooda had initially agreed that a deal “could be considered” when Rahul made the suggestion on Monday. However, during internal discussions of the party over the past three days, Hooda stridently opposed the possibility of an alliance with the AAP, or any other INDIA partner; a rare occasion when he had his intra-party rivals Selja and Surjewala agreed on an issue.

The negotiations with the AAP, however, delayed the announcement of Congress candidates while giving the BJP, which has been hamstrung by its own poll challenges ranging from palpable anti-incumbency to rebellion within its ranks, a chance to mock the Grand Old Party. BJP leaders were quick to claim that the Congress, which had thus far been claiming it would make a clean sweep of the polls, was now “desperately looking for an alliance to save face”.