BJP has won 10 Lok Sabha seats and nearly doubled its vote percentage.
New Delhi: Social engineering and the development work done by Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, coupled with the “Modi wave” ensured that the Bharatiya Janata Party put up a stellar performance in the state by sweeping all the ten Lok Sabha seats there. BJP is now confident of repeating its performance in the Assembly elections that are likely to be held around September this year. The BJP has not only won the 10 Lok Sabha seats, it has almost doubled its vote percentage in the state from the last Lok Sabha polls. In 2014, the BJP had secured 34.84% votes, winning seven seats. This time the vote share has gone up to 58.02%.
The mandate in Haryana was so huge that it helped BJP wipe out three political parties in the state, including former BJP MP Raj Kumar Saini’s Loktantra Suraksha Party (LSP), Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) and Jannayak Janata Party (JJP), formed after the split in INLD.
“BJP’s victory in Haryana is historic in many ways, and the credit for this goes to Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar. His social engineering in which he pitched for the consolidation of non-Jat voters worked well and paved the way for the party’s landslide victory. The new social coalition is likely to help BJP even in the upcoming Assembly elections,” M.N. Thakur, political expert and professor of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) told The Sunday Guardian.
“Due to the Jats’ dominant social and economic condition, the political landscape in Haryana has always been impacted by them. But caste arithmetic reveals that in Haryana out of the state’s 10 Lok Sabha seats, three, Faridabad, Gurgaon and Kurukshetra, are dominated by OBCs–Gurjars, Yadavs and Sainis, respectively. Ambala and Sirsa are reserved for Scheduled Caste candidates. The Sonipat seat has a good presence of Brahmins, while Karnal has a sizeable Punjabi population. It is the Rohtak seat that is dominated by Jat voters,” Thakur added.
Haryana’s demography is dominated by the Jat community as they constitute around 27% of its total electorate and the majority of Chief Ministers here have been from this caste. But the current Chief Minister, a Punjabi, is an exception to this trend. Interestingly, Khattar, after coming to power has successfully managed to bring the non-Jat population on one platform to make the saffron surge grow in the state.
“The 2016 Jat agitation for the demand of OBC reservation also helped BJP weave a dominant caste coalition. The Jat protestors targeted the properties of several OBC and Dalit leaders that led to a counter attack, which in return resulted in massive violence in the state. Thinking that Jat dominance could hurt their prospects, the Dalit and OBC segments voted in favour of BJP, which has been critical of the Jat agitation,” Thakur said.
Before 2014, the BJP was a non-entity in Haryana politics and much of the space was dominated by the Congress and the INLD. But in the 2014 general elections, the party won seats from the state. The Congress managed to bag only one seat, while the INLD secured two seats.
“In 2014 Assembly elections, the BJP won 47 of the 90 seats. Congress seats got reduced from 40 to 15. The INLD also lost 12 seats, coming down to 19 seats. The Akali Dal and BSP managed to win one seat each. The others could win seven seats. After the victory in Assembly elections, for the first time, a non-Jat leader was appointed as Chief Minister and since then, the BJP’s increased influence in the state has been maintained through a carefully crafted social engineering strategy,” Sanjeet Yadav, a scholar of Kurukehtra University, told The Sunday Guardian.
Both Congress and INLD were led by Jat leaders. “Previously, Jats used to play the dominant role in politics in Haryana. But Khattar wonderfully stitched together different caste coalitions and won all the Lok Sabha seats. In Haryana, just two of the BJP’s 10 parliamentarians are Jats. Similarly, in the 2014 Assembly elections, just seven of the BJP’s 47 MLAs were Jats,” Yadav said.
“For BJP’s victory, experts may give credit to the consolidation of non-Jat voters, but I feel that in the leadership of Manohar Lal Khattar our party has tried to bring all the castes and communities together. And while doing this BJP has promoted Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s slogan, which is sabka sath sabka vikas. In the past, political parties were ignoring the majority of voters who were from Saini, Yadav, Gujjar and Dalit castes,” said Raman Malik, BJP spokesperson for Haryana.
While the caste coalition worked in winning widespread electorates in the state, development work helped the BJP government to turn incumbency in their favour. Most of the people with whom The Sunday Guardian spoke in Sonipat and Rohtak, praised Khattar for introducing impartial and transparent job recruitment process in the state.
“Earlier, government jobs were available only for those who had political connections and could manage to get a recommendation letter from the political leaders, but Manohar Lal Khattar has put an end to this system and got merit into play,” Malik said.
“In Haryana, around 60,000 employees so far have been recruited in various departments of the state government. The government is going to complete another round of appointment in which 18,000 people will be recruited. The Chief Minister was praised even by the Opposition parties for removing favouritism and this has helped the party in getting a landslide victory,” Malik said.
“The education budget was increased, teachers were appointed, and more schools have been opened to make education a real movement in the state. We also introduced the qualification requirement as Class 10 pass for contesting panchayat polls. This initiative has helped in achieving the independence of panchayat leaders and reduced the interface of the bureaucracy at local levels. Direct transfer of money in most of the schemes, implementation of cleanliness mission, housing, Ujjwala schemes and pension schemes helped Khattar in gaining political clout,” Malik said.
“Dynastic politics may not have ended in the country as many dynasts have managed to win the polls, but in Haryana, the Lok Sbaha elections have marked the end of dynastic politics in the state, as six dynasts, including Bhupinder Singh Hooda and son Deepender Singh Hooda, Ajay Chautala’s sons Dushyant and Digvijay, former Haryana Chief Minister Bansi Lal’s daughter Shruti Chaudhary and Bhajan Lal’s grandson Bhavya Bishnoi, lost the elections,” Malik said.
“We are confident of repeating the Lok Sabha results in the Assembly elections. This time we have coined the slogan for the Assembly elections, ‘abki bar 70 ke par’ and the voters are going to support us in achieving our target,” Malik added.
The pension for elderly people, which was pegged at Rs 1,000, was doubled by the Khattar government, which also helped the CM and his party gain in popularity in the state.
“I have voted for the BJP, as the government has made people like me economically independent. Now I don’t need to ask for money from my son. I get Rs 2,000, which is sufficient for my monthly expenditure. The government has also given me the Ayushman Bharat card to get my treatment for free. The Khattar government is working for the benefit of the people unlike previous governments,” Satweer Singh Gurjar, a senior citizen from Sonipat told The Sunday Guardian.
Another respondent, Raunak Malik from Rohtak said, “Electricity and roads were not the issues in the constituency, the real problem was rampant favouritism in recruitment and unemployment, which the Khattar government has tried to solve.”
In 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP outperformed all the political parties in Haryana across 83 Assembly constituency segments.