Haryana Elections: The BJP’s Woes Have Taken a Sharp Turn for the Worse

After winning two successive assembly polls in Haryana, the BJP is in palpable disarray as it seeks a hat-trick in next month’s elections.

While its main electoral contender, the Congress party, is also struggling over whether to forge a problematic alliance with the Aam Aadmi Party or not, these difficulties look trivial compared to the current implosion within the ruling party. With less than a month left for the polls, both the BJP high command and Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini appear to be overwhelmed by a multitude of problems.

The BJP’s woes in Haryana took a sharp turn for the worse last week after the release of its first list of candidates for 67 seats in the 90-member state assembly. The drastic decision to change as many as 40 sitting legislators from their constituencies, dropping eight sitting MLAs including two ministers, has badly backfired, triggering the worst-ever revolt in the state unit. Nearly three dozen leaders from various districts have submitted their resignations, and rebel candidates are mushrooming across the state.

Senior party figures, cabinet ministers, MLAs, and former MLAs have left the party. Among the prominent names are State Energy Minister Rajneet Singh Chautala, son of the venerated late Jat patriarch Devi Lal, Social Justice Minister Bishamber Singh Balmiki, Ratia MLA Laxman Napa, BJP OBC Morcha state chief Karan Dev Kamboj, and former minister and India’s richest woman, Savitri Jindal belonging to one of the biggest industrialist families in the country. Several of them are about to join the Congress party while others are openly threatening to sabotage the party’s prospects in the coming polls.

Many of these aggrieved leaders wield considerable clout across the social spectrum of the Haryana electorate and could cause serious damage to the BJP in the elections.

The main reason behind the widespread resentment among BJP leaders and workers is that they have been cast aside to accommodate turncoats from other parties, most notably the Jannayak Janata Party (JJP) which was, until recently, in an alliance with the ruling party. Indeed, at least ten of the first list of 67 candidates announced are recent defectors, mostly from the JJP.

The internal convulsions of the party have completely disrupted the electoral campaign of the BJP which was already on a sticky wicket in Haryana this time, before the latest crisis within the party.

The Jat farmer’s unrest over the central government’s perceived bias against them, the continuing agitation by the champion wrestlers of the state demanding justice for women wrestlers sexually harassed by a senior BJP leader from Uttar Pradesh when he was Wrestling Federation of India chief, the restive youth disgruntled by massive unemployment and the fast deteriorating law and order situation in urban areas has culminated into a ten-year-old anti-incumbency, quite the challenge for a party so bitterly divided.

With the dominant Jat community up in arms against the BJP and consolidating behind the Congress party which has further boosted its popularity by inducting the two most prominent agitating Jat wrestlers — Vinesh Phogat and Bajrang Punia — and fielding them as candidates, the BJP was desperate to rally other communities against the Jats. But with many veteran party leaders belonging to OBC and Dalit communities now declaring themselves as rebels, the BJP’s electoral strategy appears to be falling apart.

Issues like the unemployment crisis and the breakdown of law and order are other serious challenges for the party. Haryana has the highest unemployment rate in the country, several times more than the national average, and the problem seems to have gone from bad to worse during the past decade of the BJP's rule. Significantly, apart from the chronic water scarcity and lack of infrastructural support in Haryana, a sharp rise in organised crime including extortion and shootings has discouraged private investment in a state that had earlier held the potential of becoming an investment paradise.

To make matters worse for the BJP government, the recent horrific shooting in the industrial town of Faridabad of a 12th-grade high school Hindu student named Aryan Mishra, by self-styled cow protection vigilantes made national headlines. Mishra had gone out with members of his landlord’s family in their car for a late-night snack when they were chased by the vigilante gang who mistook them for cow smugglers and opened indiscriminate fire, fatally injuring the student. The intended communal lynching gone wrong has further dented the BJP’s electoral prospects considering Mishra belonged to the Brahmin community which normally strongly favours the party during elections.

Meanwhile, both the top leadership in the central BJP and the incumbent CM Nayab Saini seem clueless as the party rapidly sinks into the Haryana quicksand. Saini did try and make initial conciliatory efforts to defuse the revolt but it has only escalated after he failed to drastically change the controversial first list of candidates. He has now publicly declared that there was little scope for changes in the list and that those who disagreed with it must put the party first and themselves second.

Clearly, the BJP seems to have not learnt from the Lok Sabha polls just a few months ago when it had suffered losses in several states not because its opponents were strong but from fractures and divisions within its own organisation. Losing yet another state in North India, which seems imminent, will no doubt further weaken both the ruling party and the prime minister, at least the way it is perceived by the public.

(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist and the author of ‘Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati’. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)