| From an image of being anti-labour for his handling of the recent Honda strike, to that of being a harbinger of Haryana's prosperity. |
| It was just a year ago that workers at the Honda factory in Gurgaon, Haryana, went on strike and were repressed all so brutally by police action live on television; it's a different matter that the police claimed that it was "provoked" by a restive crowd. |
| Whatever the finer details, it was a defining event: the state's Congress chief minister Hooda was no longer the nondescript politician he once was. He now looked quite the strongarm dictator he had portrayed former chief minister Om Prakash Chautala as during the polls. |
| From that, to the signing of a massive Rs 25,000-crore Special Economic Zone (SEZ) deal with Reliance's Mukesh Ambani to be located in "Millennium City" Gurgaon nearly a year later, Hooda has certainly come a long way. |
| "Hooda who?" is rarely ever heard anymore, for sure. |
| Hooda's main claim to fame before he became chief minister was the fact that he defeated Haryana strongman Devi Lal at the Lok Sabha elections thrice since 1991. |
| From a traditional Congress family, Hooda had never been part of the hurly-burly of the state's politics, except for a brief while in 1994, having been elected thrice from the Rohtak parliamentary constituency, a seat now held by his own son Dipender Singh. |
| By most accounts, his ascent to the chief minister's office had more to do with the Congress high command's aversion to Bhajan Lal than any positive discrimination in his favour. |
| His mishandling of the Honda strike (by failing to deploy the Rapid Action Force early, contrary to Manmohan Singh's advice, and failing to bring the management and workers to the negotiating table) earned him a reprimand from Sonia Gandhi herself. |
| In fact, Gandhi was incensed enough to tell him that he had "undone in a day what the party had taken nine years in the opposition to build". |
| Strong words. In the SEZ deal, however, Hooda seems to have learnt the rules of play. When Bhajan Lal's son Kuldeep Bishnoi raised apprehensions that prime Gurgaon real estate would be handed over to Reliance for a pittance, Hooda took the matter straight to the high command in Delhi. |
| He refused to let this become yet another factional fight in the party, and demanded that action be taken against Bishnoi. |
| At the same time, he slowed the deal, and asked the state's political establishment to go through the numbers with a finetooth comb. To be signed on June 12, the deal was postponed by a week "" enough time for Bishnoi to be served a "show cause" notice by the Congress for throwing a spanner in the works. |
| Quick action, Hooda seems to have realised, makes for good politics. Especially if it's a matter of business "" and Rs 25,000 crore. Haryana being such a small state, it's a deal that could transform its economy more dramatically than Reliance's petro-projects did Gujarat's. |
| Hooda is now one-up on Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, who's selling Noida as a rival to Gurgaon as Delhi's prime satellite city. Could the Ambani brothers give a new dimension to that rivalry? |
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