5 years later, ‘inexperienced’ CM looks unbeatable

Sushil Manav in Chandigarh

THE die is cast for the Assembly polls in Haryana where the term of the BJP government led by Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar ends next month and the new Assembly has to be constituted before November 2. While the BJP hopes to better its 2014 performance, the Opposition parties, particularly the Congress, seem determined to give the ruling party a spirited fight.

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The BJP’s confidence stems from the performance of the Khattar government during the past five years and a nationalistic fervour created by the Narendra Modi-led NDA government after the abrogation of Article 370.

Many dismissed Khattar as an inexperienced CM when Modi chose him to lead the first-ever BJP government in the state in 2014, but five years down the line, the Haryana CM is giving his opponents sleepless nights owing to the goodwill he has earned with his style of functioning.

Changed perception

Some of Khattar’s own senior party colleagues, who were reluctant to consider him as their leader, are now seen vying with each other for his meeting or a roadshow in their Assembly segments.

Today, if Modi means BJP at the national level, Khattar has become the face of the saffron party in Haryana. Ever since Khattar took over the reins in October 2014, the BJP has not lost an election in Haryana.

Khattar says he did not perform any miracle to earn his newfound reputation.

“I am the same person who took oath as CM five years back. I have not changed. It is only the perception of my opponents that has changed. They considered me inexperienced, because I had no experience of the way they ran the government to fill their own pockets. They found me inexperienced, because I was not promoting nepotism the way they did. Now, when they have realised that politics can be a means to serve people too and people are voting for the BJP because of the transparency in governance and jobs ensured by our government, their perception has changed,” he says.

Buoyed by its recent successes and a demoralised Opposition, the BJP has kept a target of winning 75-plus seats. As part of the campaign, Khattar has already crisscrossed the entire length and breadth of the state through his ‘Jan Ashirwad Rath Yatra’.

Exodus to the BJP

With a clean sweep in the Lok Sabha polls and leaders from across the political spectrum joining the BJP, there is a general perception that the Assembly elections are going to be a cakewalk for the saffron party.

After the Lok Sabha elections, 10 of the 15 INLD MLAs quit their party to join the BJP, while all five Independents, too, sided with the saffron party. As if this was not enough, Sumitra Chauhan, state president of the Haryana Mahila Congress, also resigned from her post to join the BJP last week.

Subhash Barala, state president of the BJP, however, says his party is not taking the elections lightly and the party workers have been assigned the tasks at micro and macro-levels. Interestingly, the BJP was never considered a force to reckon with in Haryana and it was for the first time in 2014 that the party came to power by winning 47 seats on its own with a vote share of 33.2 per cent.

Four months before the Assembly polls in 2014, the BJP had won seven of the eight Lok Sabha seats it contested — Hisar and Sirsa were contested by alliance partner Haryana Janhit Congress — with a vote share of 34.84 per cent. However, in the Lok Sabha elections held in May this year, the BJP made a clean sweep with a sizeable 58.02 per cent vote share.

Hooda’s return changes equation

While the BJP is confident of a landslide victory, the Opposition was in complete disarray till the Congress announced changes in the state leadership, replacing Ashok Tanwar with Kumari Selja as the state president and former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda as the CLP leader.

“The results of the Lok Sabha elections will not have any bearing on the outcome of the Assembly polls because both are entirely different ballgames,” says Hooda, alleging that the BJP government has done nothing in the past five years, while during the Congress regime, “Haryana was considered number one in the country in per capita investment and per capita income”.

Hooda maintains that the Congress will win a sufficient number of seats to get a majority. After the split in Chautala clan, both the INLD and the JJP seem to be in doldrums as is evident from the performance of these two parties in the Lok Sabha polls. Both the INLD and the JJP have announced rallies later this month to mark the birth anniversary of the clan patriarch Chaudhary Devi Lal. Similarly, the AAP, the BSP and the Lok Janshakti Party of former Kurukshetra MP Raj Kumar Saini are also unlikely to have much impact on the outcome of the Assembly polls.

Political observers believe that the ghost of the Jat quota violence of February 2016, which played a role in Lok Sabha elections by dividing voters on caste lines, could again come into play during the Assembly polls.