The electoral canvassing over the last two months in Haryana, marked as much by big promises as internal rebellions, has clearly indicated that the upcoming assembly elections on October 5 is a direct contest between the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress. The regional forces like the Om Prakash Chautala-led Indian National Lok Dal or the Dushyant Chautala-led Jannayak Janta Party have failed to enthuse voters on the ground.
There is, however, a social dimension that may prove to be the most crucial factor in the polls. The BJP’s prospects will depend on its ability to keep its plank of social polarisation intact by pitting all Hindu communities against the dominant Jat peasantry, while the Congress, under the leadership of Bhupinder Singh Hooda, will look to foreground macro concerns like unemployment, farmers’ movement, and rising inequalities in the largely agrarian state.
The assembly polls in Haryana will essentially be a contest between the BJP’s ability to exploit the state’s deep social contradictions that may potentially cancel out the poor track record of two successive saffron governments in the state and Congress’s eagerness to reach out to and make a positive impact on non-Jat communities that may help it compensate for its largely unrepresentative leadership in the state.
For decades, Haryana has had chief ministers who belonged to the dominant Jat community, including Bansi Lal, Devi Lal, Om Prakash Chautala, and most recently Bhupinder Singh Hooda. Despite constituting merely 27% of the state’s population, the community owns the largest share of land holdings in the state – both agrarian and non-agrarian. The caste group has also a disproportionate access to the state’s resources. In the last two decades, it became infamous for its socially-conservative views, which included many of its leaders justifying even honour killings of women who chose independent paths. However, the members of the community now feel squeezed by a structural agrarian crisis of the last few decades, and have become prominent participants in nationwide farmers’ stirs and demand for reservation in jobs and education.
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Other communities in the state have long resented the disproportionate dominance of Jats in the state and view the community as oppressive and discriminatory. These communities, a large section of which had lived under an exploitative feudal order and had been feeling similarly cornered in market-driven development models, began to perceive the Jats’ demand for reservation as yet another ploy to deny them their constitutional and political rights.
The ever-sharpening social fault line is what BJP, bolstered further by Narendra Modi’s leadership, could exploit for its electoral advantage in 2014. The saffron party secured two back-to-back victories in the state by consolidating a majority of 35 communities of the state in its favour and pitting them against the dominant community, the Jats. The BJP’s slogan “35 banaam 1 (35 against 1)” in the last two assembly polls in the state captured the imagination of a large chunk of non-Jat caste groups.
Given the fact that the BJP had negligible organisational presence in the state, it readily elevated non-Jat leaders to high positions and even went on to give Haryana its first Punjabi Khatri chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar and now its first Saini chief minister Nayab Singh Saini.
However, the Congress appears to have made a strong comeback after 10 long years, and is buoyant about its prospects. It has surely received a fillip from Khattar’s poor governance and the saffron party’s failure to go beyond its formula of equitable political representation and actually help make substantive improvements in living conditions of non-Jat communities.
The Congress has taken care to field a substantial number of non-Jats in the electoral arena, while also aggressively campaigning along material concerns of people across all communities. As a result, unemployment, the Agnipath scheme, irregular procurement of grains, price rise, and above all poor leadership provided by both Khattar and Saini have become the biggest talking points in the run-up to the assembly polls, lending a perceptible advantage to the grand-old party.
The BJP, however, is fighting anti-incumbency by running a strong ground-level campaign targeting the Jat leadership of the Congress, and hopes to drown out the macro factors working against it. For most voters, the Hooda clan represents the Congress in Haryana. All other Congress leaders from different communities like Kumari Selja, a Dalit, or Chander Mohan Bishnoi, former chief minister Bhajan Lal Bishnoi’s son, lack the grip that Hooda has on the state unit of the party.
Despite the Congress’s failure to adequately represent and empower leaders from non-Jat communities over the last decade, all the party leaders have consistently made it a point to be seen as inclusive. “36 biradariyon ka samarthan hai humein (All 36 communities are supporting us),” the Congress leaders have often been heard as asserting in all their statements, turning such an assumption into almost a slogan for their party. To offset Hooda’s perception as a only a Jat leader, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi have extensively campaigned across a large number of regions where non-Jat communities are numerically strong.
As voters will organise themselves into factions ahead of polling, both the Congress and the BJP can expect a tough run. The challenger seeks to trigger a social churn, while the incumbent prefers the status quo.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
