State scan: Is Haryana caste arithmetic in BJP's favour in upcoming polls?

Haryana CM is ready for simultaneous Lok Sabha and Assembly polls in the state. Is caste arithmetic in BJP's favour? Aditi Phadnis explains

Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar let the cat out of the bag last month.
 

At a press conference on December 3 in Hisar, he said the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government was ready to hold the assembly elections along with the Lok Sabha polls if the Election Commission of India and the BJP’s Central Election Committee thought it appropriate. The assembly elections in Haryana are due in October. If they are held in April-May, along with the general elections, they will be nearly six months earlier than scheduled.
 

Khattar was speaking as the results of the assembly polls in Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh came in and the BJP was in the process of forming governments in all three states. The BJP’s spectacular victory in the three states could have been a reason for his readiness to advance polls. Although the party saw significant attrition in its seat numbers in last assembly elections in Haryana, the party is buoyed by the belief that if the assembly and Lok Sabha elections are held simultaneously, that outcome could become just a bad memory.
 

In the 2019 general elections, while the BJP won all 10 seats, it slipped below the majority mark in the assembly elections six months later. Of 90 seats, the BJP got 40 and had to reach out to Dushyant Chautala’s Janata Jannayak Party (JJP), which had 10. Later, after a byelection victory for former Congress and non-Jat leader Kuldeep Bishnoi’s son Bhavya and the support of five independents, the party did not need the JJP’s support.
 

But caste politics dictates that it cannot rest on its laurels.

 

Former Congress leader and well-known Haryana politician Venod Sharma explained that two factors were crucial in Haryana politics. “One is caste. The other is timing”.
 

He explained that the minute voters got an inkling that the Jats were unifying, non-Jat voters tended to band together. While this worked to the BJP’s advantage in 2014 —when ML Khattar, a non-Jat from the Punjabi community who was the organisation general secretary of the BJP in Haryana from 2000 to 2014 and head of the campaign committee in the 2014 general elections, was made chief minister in 2014 — the party lost ground among Jat voters later.
 

Interestingly, in 2014, then BJP President Amit Shah appointed Subhash Barala, a Jat as state president, replacing Ram Bilas Sharma, a Brahmin, to maintain the caste balance. However, the results were sub-optimal, as the 2019 assembly polls outcome revealed. Barala was later replaced by O P Dhankar, another Jat.

After Dhankar’s three-year term ended, earlier last year, BJP President J P Nadda replaced him with Kurukshetra MP Nayab Singh Saini, an OBC. So, the consolidation of non-Jat castes that resent Jat domination is complete. The BJP is offering itself as an alternative to them.
 

Prof Ashutosh Kumar, chairperson, department of political science, Panjab University, says Saini’s appointment “is obviously to counter the caste census move of the Congress-led INDIA bloc”.

“With (Bhupinder Singh) Hooda, a Jat, being the face of the Congress, the BJP would obviously look towards Kuldeep Bishnoi and Saini to bring in non-Jat votes,” he says.
 

He said nearly 70 per cent of Haryana’s population belongs to OBCs and scheduled castes (SCs), while land ownership in the state remains heavily with Jats.
 

In the past five years, the Jat-non Jat rivalry in the state has caused violence and mayhem. In 2016, a largely leaderless riot had Haryana in its grips for several days. Observers say a movement to demand reservations in government jobs for Jats turned violent and mobs attacked the property of non-Jats, especially Sainis, as well as government property.

Yet, Jats and non-Jats alike voted for the BJP in the 2019 general elections. Here lies the key to the plan to advance the Haryana Assembly election. 

“They expect to win the elections this time using the Narendra Modi card, besides hoping that simultaneous voting will influence the assembly poll outcome,” Sharma said.
 

While Khattar says Haryana is ready for simultaneous polls, not wanting to be caught napping, other parties, too, are getting ready to hit the road. In December, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’s Badlav Yatra crisscrossed the entire state; it announced the party would contest assembly elections alone. The Congress had, on 1 January, announced a slew of pre-poll promises, including gas cylinders at Rs 500, restoration of the Old Pension Scheme, and 300 units of free electricity. It will start a Ghar-Ghar Congress campaign in the state. This announcement was made during a workers’ meeting in Karnal, Khattar’s assembly constituency, where a resolution was also passed to vote out the BJP-JJP coalition government.
 

Observers say the state government is banking on the fact that unlike Odisha, where voters display a sense of differentiation between the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls, even if they are held together, In Haryana, caste can change the outcome as politics hots up in the state.