Haryana: The BJP’s (mis)deeds come home to roost

Winning the Haryana Assembly election later this year will be as crucial, if not more, for the BJP as for the Opposition. Besides fighting a 10-year anti-incumbency, there are other odds the BJP has to overcome.

For one, there is resentment over the influx of leaders from other parties. Kurukshetra MP Naveen Jindal, former Independent MLA Ranjit Chautala and Aam Aadmi Party leader and ex-Congressman Ashok Tanwar switched to the BJP before the Lok Sabha elections and were given tickets to contest within days of joining.

BJP workers are also sore over the inclusion of former Congress leader from Bhiwani, Kiran Choudhry, and her daughter Shruti. (The buzz is that Kiran has been promised a Rajya Sabha seat and her daughter a ticket to contest for the Assembly.) Yet more leaders are expected to join the party as the Assembly election (scheduled for October) draws closer. As they bring along their own trusted teams, old party faithfuls feel overshadowed and under-appreciated.

Satish Punia, BJP leader in charge of the state, defends the influx by saying this is how parties grow: “We cannot shut our door to them”. Besides, he adds, once they join, they are no longer outsiders. Punia points to current chief minister Nayab Singh Saini rising from the ranks to become the chief minister as proof that the party does not discriminate against faithful insiders.

While the BJP replaced the chief minister in March this year to fight anti-incumbency and got former CM Manohar Lal Khattar elected to the Lok Sabha and made a Union minister, Saini is struggling to fill his predecessor’s shoes. Khattar is still widely seen as the de facto chief minister. With Saini reportedly telling senior bureaucrats to clear tricky administrative issues with Khattar first, there is a sense of drift.

Ministers are pulling in different directions, with former high-profile home minister Anil Vij sulking after the portfolio was taken away from him. Law and order in the state is also proving to be a challenge, with more frequent incidents of shooting, abductions and ransom calls to traders.

An even greater problem for the BJP government in Haryana is spiralling public debt, said to have shot up from Rs 70,000 crore a decade ago to Rs 4.5 lakh crore (if former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda is to be believed). Hooda wondered where all the money had gone, pointing out that the BJP government had not established new universities, power plants or extended Metro lines brought by the Congress government, and still managed to incur this huge public debt.

“Haryana was no. 1 on many parameters, including per capita investment, jobs, sports, law and order. Now, Haryana has become no. 1 in unemployment, lawlessness and inflation,” he said, addressing a rally at Charkhi Dadri this week.

Compare their performance in their respective 10-year tenures, he said, and then decide whether to vote for the Congress or the BJP. Alleging that sportspersons in the state have been neglected by the BJP government, he went on to accuse the party of encouraging employment on contract.

Beware the ire of the kisan, jawan and pehelwan

Popular wisdom has it that winning elections in Haryana by ignoring the kisan (farmer), the jawan (soldier) and the pehelwan (wrestler) is next to impossible. The BJP seems to be paying the price for humiliating all three.

The Manohar Lal Khattar government stood by the Union government in thwarting the farmers from protesting against the contentious farm laws in 2021-22. Canes lashed out and water cannons rained on the protesting farmers as the police dug up roads, put up concrete walls to stop the tractors and used drones to fire tear gas shells.

The brutal manhandling by Delhi Police of our decorated women wrestlers during their protests is another black mark against the BJP.

However, the biggest letdown has been the Agniveer scheme, which has quickly snowballed into a political issue. The anger is so widespread that state ministers are bearing the brunt of the backlash. When quizzed by an ex-serviceman, Ranjit Chautala tried to explain that the state government had little to do with the scheme, which was decided by the Union government and the chiefs of the three defence services.

Undeterred, the ex-serviceman asked why he had not registered his protest in that case, and opposed the scheme. Chautala had no answer, and neither does the BJP.

The ministry of defence had informed the Lok Sabha in response to questions that in 2019-20, a total of 5,097 youth from Haryana had been selected for the army. Three other states had higher numbers than Haryana that year — Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Punjab. The information appeared to confirm the claim that despite comprising just two per cent of the country’s population, Haryana used to contribute six per cent of the army’s recruits.

It also corroborates the claim made by Congress MP Deepender Hooda that only 900 recruits a year joined the army in the last two years as against an earlier average of 5,000 recruits a year. Worse, only 200 of these ‘Agniveers’ would get absorbed into the army each year — after four years.

It is easy to see why the scheme is catastrophic. With roughly every tenth soldier in the army being from Haryana, there is hardly a village which does not have a large number of aspirants; in fact, hardly a family without a member in the army.

Anecdotal evidence holds that every year, an average of 200,000 youth trained for the army at any given time. Many of them joined academies to prepare for tests and get ‘coaching’. There was an extensive network of such academies and trainers, mostly ex-servicemen, dotting the state. The scheme, however, has put an end to this entire ecosystem.

Even before the scheme was introduced, recruitments had been frozen because of the pandemic. Several despondent youths chose suicide, because they had exceeded the eligible age by the time recruitment was reopened.

An ever-increasing number of youths from the state are trying to go abroad, legally or illegally. It does not matter where, Russia, Europe, Israel, as long as they are assured of some kind of work. In the Barauda village in Jind, residents say as many as 400 young men have left for destinations abroad in the last few years.

Those who are unable to go, they claim, are taking to drugs. Dozens of coaching academies in Hisar have shut down. “People are upset because of the double-engine government’s arbitrary decisions taken without consultations. They feel that the government has reduced the stature of army jawans to that of daily wagers,” reflects social worker Shweta Dhull.