In 2005, the Congress swept to power in Haryana with a tally so impressive that it has never really been able to replicate. The Congress won 67 seats in the 90-member Assembly, the opposition was leaderless and decimated and it was clear that Jat or non-Jat, everyone in Haryana had voted for the Congress.
But was that really so? The Jats were angry with the Om Prakash Chautala family so they rejected them. But even more angry was a coalition of anti-Jat parties that coalesced behind non-Jat Congress leader Bhajan Lal. The non-Jats led the Congress to victory: but it was a Jat, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, who was made chief minister.
It is not hard to understand what party strategicians were thinking in 2005 — Jats are pathologically anti-Congress, this is the best time to offer them a leader, if we can create a Jat alternative we can eliminate the Jat challenge to the Congress forever.
Lal kept waiting for a call asking him to become the leader of the Congress Legislature Party. It never came. Instead, Hooda became chief minister with votes that Lal reckoned he had brought to the Congress. Hooda was not even a Member of the Legislative Assembly (he contested the election later).
Hooda should have maintained some caste balance. But he had to prove he was a Jat leader. He couldn’t appear to compromise. The Congress leadership in Delhi sensed Lal’s rage. They offered him governorship and his son, Kuldeep Bishnoi, the deputy chief ministership, hoping the father-son team would accept this and eventually be defanged. It was rejected. Lal quit the Congress and in 2007 formed the Haryana Janhit Congress.
If Bishnoi had accepted the offer, the Congress would have become the umbrella caste coalition, the one roof under which Jats and non-Jats would have coexisted. Bishnoi would have been a natural chief ministerial candidate and the history of the Congress in Haryana might have changed.
But in 2007 he and his four MLAs quit. Later, all four rejoined the Congress and for a while it seemed as if he’d lost everything.
Then came the 2010 Assembly elections. The Congress managed to win 45 seats, which meant that Hooda was just about able to form a government. Despite doing his best, the Jats, it was clear, had reverted to the Chautala-led Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) that got 31 seats.
But Hooda was not giving up. He had to win the confidence of the Jats — that is what his party had asked him to do. Today every important public post in Haryana is occupied by a Jat. Every decision is Jat-centric, the latest example being the management of the Mirchpur anti-Dalit riots where Jats attacked Dalits and the station house officer (SHO), a Jat, refused to register a case, leading to judicial intervention. A recent decision was to appoint a Jat as director general of health services, superseding many others. And when he retired, he was reemployed in the same job!
The death of Lal and the recent Hisar by-election for the Lok Sabha seat he had held indicates how much trouble the Congress is in: despite camping in the constituency for one month, the chief minister was unable to ensure the party’s victory — in fact, the Congress candidate lost his deposit. Bishnoi has proved he is a comeback kid. What is more, the Hisar victory has cemented an alliance between the Haryana Janhit Congress and the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). True, the Meo Muslims who are a significant factor in the Mewat region will be forced out of the non-Jat alliance as a result of the BJP’s presence in the coalition (they won five seats in the last Assembly election). But when you consider that all the anti-Jat castes: the Dalits, the Brahmins, the Yadav, the Punjabis, the Banias and other will come together behind the Haryana Janhit Congress-BJP alliance… that’s quite substantial.
There are two possibilities. The Jats flock back to INLD; or are divided between the Congress and the INLD. But the non-Jats are likely to rally behind Haryana Janhit Congress-BJP. This means if Bishnoi and the BJP work hard, the Lok Sabha election setback for the BJP (it lost more than five per cent of the vote share in the 2009 election) could be reversed. Haryana is one state that the United Progressive Alliance should be very worried about.
