Given barely two weeks to finalise their candidates, the Election Commission (EC) on Friday announced that the Haryana Assembly polls will be held in a single phase on October 1. The counting of votes will take place on October 4.
The 90-seat Haryana Assembly’s term is ending on November 3. This will be the first time in nearly 20 years that the two States will go to polls separately. It was in 2004 when Assembly elections were held in Maharashtra alone. Haryana went to polls a few months later in 2005. But since 2009, both States have been going to polls together. In 2019, elections in both Haryana and Maharashtra were held on October 21.
While announcing the poll schedule, Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar said Assembly elections in Maharashtra, which were held along with Haryana in 2019, will be announced later due to security requirements for Jammu and Kashmir.
He said four elections are due this year and by early next year and since Jammu and Kashmir was not in the picture last time (2019-20) the Commission decided to group two Assembly elections together. “There was heavy rainfall in Maharashtra, BLOs (booth level officers) have to complete their work. There are several festivals too that have to be factored in.
“Ganesh Festival, Pitru Paksha, Navratri, Diwali, all that put together this is what we thought we could handle as two elections at a time,” the CEC said.
In the past three cycles, the EC had announced Haryana and Maharashtra elections together. Maharashtra Assembly’s term is expiring on November 26. Kumar also hinted that the Maharashtra elections could be held after Diwali.
Moreover, since Maharashtra is a large State, the poll panel will have to deploy heavy security over there too for the Assembly elections. Since Haryana’s Assembly term will wrap up earlier on November 3, it was easier for EC to club it with J&K. Elections are due in both Maharashtra and Jharkhand by the end of this year.
The State polls will see the BJP, the ruling party, go up against a resurgent Congress after a neck-and-neck fight in the Lok Sabha elections two months ago.
The Assembly election in Haryana is a litmus test for ruling BJP, which has been ruling the state since 2014. For the BJP, the ground reality this time is quite different from five years ago.
Both the parties won five seats each in the Lok Sabha polls and back in 2019, the saffron party won 40 out of 90 Assembly seats in Haryana.
The Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) secured 10 seats and formed an alliance by joining hands with the BJP. Manohar Lal Khattar, who was chosen as the chief minister in 2014, had got a second term in office five years ago. On March 12 this year, Khattar stepped down as chief minister and Nayab Singh Saini was sworn in as the CM. Khattar’s resignation marked the end of BJP’s alliance with JJP.
The Congress in 2019 missed out on an opportunity to form the government in Haryana five years go despite winning 31 seats after JJP decided to share power with the BJP. The grand old party would be hoping to come back to power in the state it ruled from 2004 to 2014 under now leader of opposition Bhupinder Singh Hooda. The parliamentary polls, meanwhile, breathed a new lease of life into the Congress that is now confident about its chances of ending BJP rule. For the party, containing its infighting and keeping the different factions in line will be a key challenge if it has to return to power.
The Congress has been attacking the BJP as part of its ‘Haryana Maange Hisab’ campaign, after its launch on July 15, targeting the ruling party over several issues concerning farmers as well as unemployment, law and order and others. The AAP, whose campaign is being led by Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann and his Delhi counterpart Arvind Kejriwal’s wife Sunita, has announced it will contest all 90 seats.
“There are a total of 90 assembly constituencies in Haryana, of which 73 are general, SC-17 and ST-0. There will be a total of 2.01 crore voters in Haryana spread over 20,629 polling stations, of which 1.06 crore are males, 0.95 crore are females, 4.52 lakhs are first-time voters and 40.95 lakhs are young voters. The electoral roll of Haryana will be published on 27th August 2024,” Kumar said.
According to Kumar, several high-rise apartment complexes in Gurugram and some other cities in Haryana will have their own polling stations for the upcoming assembly elections.Kumar said the move was aimed at tackling “urban apathy”.”In Gurgaon, Faridabad and Sonipat, many polling stations have been shifted to high-rise societies so that congestion is reduced and also polling percentage increases. This is one way of handling urban apathy in elections,” Kumar said.”Some stations will also be set up in slum areas,” he added.
