 | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  |  |  | | SLUGFEST: Bhajan (top) will encash his experience; Hooda (middle) and Birender Singh will play the Jat card | | Long before the voters lined up at the polling booths, the suspense had gone out of the Haryana assembly elections. It did not need pollsters or political pundits to predict that Om Prakash Chautala was in for a drubbing and the Congress, after nine years, was set for a landslide win. The real suspense thus came after the results were out on February 27. With an unprecedented tally of 67 seats in the 90-member Assembly, the party found itself grappling with an internal power struggle as four contenders slugged it out for the top job. State Congress chief and three-time chief minister Bhajan Lal was the front runner on account of his experience and the support of 32-odd newly elected MLAs. His arch rivals upped the ante by pressing the high command to anoint a Jat leader. "It is a mandate for a Jat chief minister," they argue, pointing out that out of 33 Jat candidates who made it to the assembly, 29 are from the Congress. The road to the chief minister's office is far from smooth for Bhajan Lal who faces opposition from fellow contenders. There is Bhupinder Singh Hooda, a Jat and four-time MP from Rohtak. Others flaunting their Jat credentials include Birender Singh and Randeep Singh Surjewala, the "giant killer" who felled Chautala in the fiercely contested battle in Narwana. Notwithstanding his much touted bravado before and after the polling, Chautala's challenge fizzled out in the face of a resurgent Congress. Barring him, all his ministers, including five-time MLA and finance minister Sampat Singh, fell by the wayside. The only face-saver for the Jat chieftain was his win from Rori, a safe turf in his home district of Sirsa. So severe was the INLD's drubbing that it drew a blank in 12 of the 19 districts. Paradoxically, the sprawling Jat heartland-the traditional power base of the INLD-proved to be its Waterloo. Chautala is the only Jat candidate from his party to have won the elections-a clear pointer to the fact that the Jat vote bank which constitutes 28 per cent of the electorate deserted the INLD en masse and plumped for the Congress.
| | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | HUMBLED: Chautala lost because of his arrogant style of governance | | Crestfallen, Chautala promised to look into the reasons for his party's debacle. But the reasons are obvious, and the badly mauled INLD supremo has no one to blame but himself. At the heart of the party's electoral nemesis was Chautala's arrogant and control-all-levers-of-power style of governance which allowed his sons Ajay and Abhay to call the shots but reduced his ministers to mere figureheads. Not only did such autocratic functioning erode the party's support base but also lent grist to the Opposition's oft-repeated allegations about Chautala running "a single window system" of cash-and-carry regime. This perception sunk deep in the public mind and undid his rather impressive report card on development works. For the INLD, however, the severest-and most shocking-punishment came from the peasantry, a vote bank that has traditionally been the sheet anchor of the party's electoral fortune. A colloquial saying in rural Haryana is that Jats can accept a bhola (simpleton) as their leader, but never a wily clansman. The peasantry's disenchantment was evident from the way the Jat juggernaut decimated the INLD in the first assembly election without Devi Lal, Chautala's father and an iconic Jat leader in his lifetime. | VOTE VAULT
With its single figure presence, the INLD is no opposition at all | | | | PARTIES | 2005 | 2000 | | Indian National Congress | 67
(42.46) | 21
(26.77) | | Indian National Lok Dal | 9
(26.77) | 47
(26.77) | | Bharatiya Janata Party | 2
(10.36) | 6
(8.94) | | Independents and others | 12 | 16 | | Figures in brackets are percentage votes | | Much of the reasons for the Jats dumping Chautala so decisively lie with his aggressive and nonchalant style of governance. He antagonised the Jats by backtracking on his promise to waive off the pending power bills and instead using strong-arm tactics to crush the farmers' agitation spearheaded by the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) three years ago. The turning point was the police firing on BKU activists in the Jatland of Jind resulting in the killing of six farmers. With the firebrand BKU leader Ghasi Ram Nain throwing his lot behind the Congress and the Bansi Lal-led Haryana Vikas Party's merger with the Congress, the Jat vote further consolidated against Chautala. In fact, nothing clicked for the INLD supremo. Not even his desperate efforts-including populist sops that jettisoned the administrative and financial reforms he had initiated-to retrieve the lost ground after the crushing defeat in the Lok Sabha elections last year in which the INLD drew a blank in all the 10 seats. Chautala was not alone in the humiliating defeat. The BJP, which had been his fellow traveller for four years before it snapped its ties with the INLD, could garner only two seats-four less than its tally in the 2000 election which it had contested as an ally of Chautala. Clearly, the electorate voted tactically to avoid a split of the anti-INLD vote. The new Congress regime faces an unenviable challenge. Besides striking a balance among the party factions, its first tough test will be the party's promise to put Chautala in the dock on charges of corruption. While the Jat lobby in the Congress is in favour of a "Parkash Singh Badal type" action against him, another section sees it as a risky gambit as it could revive him politically. Ultimately, whoever takes over as Haryana's chief minister will have to look over his shoulders for enemies within and outside the party. Index
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