Vivek Gupta 
Chandigarh: Even as the BJP stormed to power for a record third time in Haryana, there is a long list of heavyweights across parties having bitten the dust.
For instance, Congress state president Udai Bhan lost the election from the reserved constituency of Hodal in Palwal district by a margin of 2,500 votes.
It is his second consecutive defeat from this seat.
The defeat of such a high-profile candidate indicates what was going wrong in the party.
Taking the reins of the state leadership from the party’s prominent Dalit face Kumari Selja in 2022, he was widely seen as a proxy of former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda.
This widened the conflict between the Hooda and Selja camps and ultimately harmed the party’s poll prospects.
A message behind Bhan’s defeat is that elections cannot be fought with overconfidence, said political analyst Kushal Pal.
“I personally know several ticket aspirants in the Congress who were working on the ground for the last several years. But none of them were pacified either by Bhan or other senior leaders after they were denied tickets,” he added.
Another high-profile setback in the Congress is a loss for Chaudhary Brijendra Singh, son of veteran congress leader Chaudhary Birender Singh, in his family’s traditional seat of Uchana Kalan by a mere 32 votes.
Pal said that Brijendra Singh lost the election not because the BJP candidate was politically strong, but because the party did not make serious efforts to pacify rebel leader Virender Ghoghadia. The latter polled over 31,000 votes, more than enough to have aided Brijendra Singh’s defeat.
Gohana was another seat in Jat-dominated Sonipat district, where young Congress aspirant Harsh Chhikara polled more than 14,000 votes as an independent candidate, four thousand more than Congress candidate Jagbir Malik’s losing margin.
Also read: Congress’s Hooda Blunder Has Paved the Way for BJP’s Historic Third Mandate in Haryana
INLD, JJP heavyweights also prominent losers
Haryana’s regional outfits, the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) and its splinter group, the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) – all under the control of the extended Chautala family – was not expecting to do well electorally for various political reasons. But the losses experienced by heavyweights in these parties came as a shock.
As many as eight members of the Chautala family – belonging to former deputy prime minister and prominent Jat leader Chaudhary Devi Lal’s clan – were in the fray in various seats.
Except for two, all others lost the polls.
Notable among them is Abhay Chautala, the INLD’s main leader, who lost from his bastion of Ellenabad in Sirsa district by a margin of 15,000 votes, even as he had won this seat four times since 2010.
Chautala had tied up with the Bahujan Samaj Party to create a Jat-Dalit rainbow coalition, which did not work on the ground.
Apart from Abhay Chautala, Sunaina Chautala, another family member, contested unsuccessfully as an INLD candidate from Fatehabad.
In the JJP, which emerged in 2018 after a family feud among the Chautalas, the party’s main face and former deputy chief minister Dushyant Chautala experienced a miserable electoral defeat from his bastion of Uchana Kalan in Jind district.
He had slid to fifth position as his losing margin was over 40,000 votes.
His younger brother, Digvijay Chautala, who fought as a JJP candidate from Dabwali in Sirsa district, lost the polls by over 20,000 votes.
Overall, the JJP polled less than 1% of the total vote, in contrast to the 15% it did in the 2019 assembly election.
The loss of its core voter base among the peasantry class, especially Jats, is said to be main reason for the INLD and the JJP’s political misfortunes.
Former deputy chief minister Dushyant Chautala slid to fifth position in his bastion of Uchana Kalan, having lost by more than 40,000 votes. Photo: X/@JJPofficial.
Majority of Saini’s ministers lost, speaker out too
Even as the BJP’s victory stunned everyone, the majority of ministers in chief minister Nayab Singh Saini’s government lost the election.
His cabinet, formed in March this year after the BJP replaced its earlier chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar, had a total of 13 ministers.
Three – Seema Trikha, Banwari Lal and Bishamber Singh – were dropped from the party’s list. Of the remaining ten in the contest, eight lost the election.
Besides, the BJP’s Haryana assembly speaker Gian Chand Gupta also could not retain his traditional seat of Panchkula.
State agriculture minister Kanwar Pal is among the high-profile candidates who lost the election. He lost from Jagadhri in Yamunanagar district to the Congress’s Akram Khan by a margin of 6,800 votes.
Here the presence of Aam Aadmi Party candidate Adarsh Pal Singh, who polled over 43,000 votes, played spoilsport for the BJP minister.
In Muslim-dominated Nuh, Sanjay Singh, minister of state for sports, slid to third position and lost by a massive margin of 75,900 votes.
State health minister Kamal Gupta lost his constituency in Hisar to BJP rebel and independent Savitri Jindal.
Other notable losers in the Saini cabinet are finance minister Jai Prakash Dalal in Loharu, power minister Ranjit Singh (who fought as an independent), local bodies minister Subhash Sudha from Thanesar, transport minister Aseem Goel from Ambala city and irrigation and water resources minister Abhe Singh Yadav from Nangal.