Chandigarh: By winning five of Haryana’s ten seats in the Lok Sabha, the Congress has prepared the ground for the assembly elections due in October this year.
This has been the party’s best performance since the 2009 general elections, when it won nine of the state’s ten seats.
It won just two seats in the 2014 general elections and failed to win even a single seat in 2019.
With five seats in its kitty now, the Congress’s performance has exposed the chinks in the BJP’s poll strategy, which relied mostly on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity as well as the polarisation of non-Jat communities.
Both factors – which otherwise helped the BJP win back-to-back state as well as general elections since 2014 – were diluted this time, leading to BJP’s worst performance since the 2014 general elections.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
On the contrary, Jats consolidated heavily behind the Congress as reflected in the party’s strong performance in the Jat-dominated seats of Rohtak, Hisar and Sonipat.
For instance, the party’s Rohtak candidate Deepender Hooda won by over 3.42 lakh votes. Its Hisar and Sonipat candidates defeated their BJP rivals by over 63,381 and 21,816 votes respectively.
The results also showed that the Congress managed to bring Dalits back to its side. Dalits were an important cog in the BJP’s polarisation of non-Jat communities during the Modi era.
The Congress has been leading strongly in both of Haryana’s reserved constituencies, Ambala and Sirsa, which voted for the BJP in the last elections.
In Sirsa, Congress candidate Kumari Selja enjoyed a strong victory with over 2.68 lakh votes, while the party’s Ambala candidate Varun Chaudhry won by over 47,000 votes.
Multiple factors have worked in favour of the Congress, poll pundits said.
Kushal Pal, a political analyst based in Kurukshetra, told The Wire that a section of Jats in Haryana has always supported the Congress, but the results show there was heavy Jat consolidation behind the party at the cost of other Jat-oriented parties like the Jannayak Janata Party and the Indian National Lok Dal.
“The farm protest was among the main reasons. The farmers, who primarily belong to this community, were not happy with the way the BJP government in the state mistreated them in the recent past,” he said.
Pal, who is also principal of the Indira Gandhi National College in Kurukshetra’s Ladwa, added that the results showed that Dalits too went out of the BJP’s fold due to factors like unemployment and lower wages.
“Overall, the poll results showed that the Modi factor too had its limitations. It does not work all the time, as the BJP was hoping for,” he said.
Anti-incumbency
Anti-incumbency against the BJP’s nine-and-a-half year rule in Haryana is also seen as another factor in the party’s downfall in the state.
The BJP replaced Manohar Lal Khattar, its chief minister in the state since 2014, with Nayab Saini in March this year in a hope to beat anti-incumbency.
With the change the BJP also planned to consolidate non-Jat votes – Saini is among the party’s prominent OBC faces.
But the results showed that this did not work beyond the Kurukshetra and Karnal constituencies, which are home to a considerable OBC population as well as other non-Jat communities.
From Karnal, Khattar won handsomely by over 2.30 lakh votes, while Naveen Jindal won Kurukshetra by over 29,000 votes.
The only silver lining for the BJP is its good performance in south Haryana, where it managed to retain all three seats – Faridabad, Gurgaon and Bhiwani-Mahendragarh.
Meanwhile, according to poll observers, the Congress has a fair chance to return to power in the state during the coming assembly polls.
“Jats and Dalits helped the Congress win state elections in the past. The return of both votes is a good sign for the party ahead of the polls,” said Pal.
