Quashing exit polls results that were unanimous in projecting a clean sweep by Congress, Haryana poll results presented a dramatic turnaround as Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) scored a hat trick by winning 48 seats of the 90 members’ Legislative Assembly. The party improved its performance by winning seven more seats than it had in the outgoing Assembly.

Congress won 37 seats, Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) won two seats and Independents won three seats.  The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Jannayak Janata Party (JJP) have drawn a blank. The half-way mark is 46.

The BJP’s astonishing performance will reinvigorate the ruling party cadres, and could deal a debilitating blow to the Congress looking for further ascendancy after its improved show in the Lok Sabha polls.

Among prominent candidates, Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini, Congress leader Bhupinder Singh Hooda, and his new party colleague Vinesh Phogat won, as did Independent candidate Savitri Jindal. The INLD’s Abhay Singh Chautala lost, as did JJP’s Dushyant Chautala, Haryana Assembly. Speaker and BJP’s Gian Chand Gupta, Haryana Lokhit Party Gopal Kanda.

After the victory, Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini credited Prime Minister Narendra Modi with the BJP’s hat-trick in the state where he took charge barely six months ago.

“I want to thank 2.8 crore people of Haryana who have reposed faith in the policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This is the victory of Haryana’s farmers, the poor, women, and youth. People have voted for PM Modi’s work for Haryana. It is a historic victory.

We have succeeded in Haryana for the third time with the blessings of Modi ji,” the 54-year-old BJP leader said.

Saini won the Ladwa Assembly seat by a margin of more than 16,000 votes defeating his nearest Congress rival while Hooda retained his Garhi Sampla-Kiloi seat in Rohtak district.Savitri Jindal, who contested as an Independent after failing to get BJP’s nomination, won the Hisar seat. Congress’s Vinesh Phogat from Julana seat, registered a victory defeating her nearest BJP rival Yogesh Kumar by a margin of 6,015 votes.

Since the counting began at 8 am, the trends were dramatic. The initial swing was in Congress’ favour and subsequently the BJP regained ground,  and secured a massive victory. The higher voting turnout had been erroneously interpreted as a vote for change against the two decade long BJP rule in the Jat dominated state.

The BJP was seen at a disadvantage owing to anti-incumbency, dissatisfaction of the Jat and the farmer communities. In this election, the Congress depended heavily on the Jats, particularly because the community was angry with the BJP over the farmers’ agitation and the wrestlers’ protest.

The Haryana Assembly poll was supposed to be a Congress election all through. The discussion was centred on its margin of victory. But the Haryana Assembly. polls have delivered a surprising result that defied political predictions, marking significant changes in the state political landscape.

Key factors included Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s enduring popularity, strategic leadership change, effective management of caste votes, combating internal factionalism, and addressing local concerns over national issues.

Modi’s promises of corruption-free governance, combined with the central government’s outreach efforts, ensured that the “Brand Modi” appeal remained intact. This helped the BJP maintain its foothold in Haryana, even as it faced challenges from the opposition and internal factionalism.

The intense poll campaigns by the senior Congress leaders, including Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, also could not yield the desired result for the opposition party.

If the results were a timely boost for the BJP ahead of elections in Maharashtra later this year, they were a massive downer for the Congress that was hoping to consolidate its gains from the Lok Sabha verdict and began the morning with enthusiastic leaders distributing sweets. Though the Congress increased its vote share by a massive 11 percentage points, its overall share of over 39 per cent was still slightly behind the 39.89 per cent of the BJP, which also made gains on its support in the 2019 polls.

A stunning victory in Haryana coupled with its best-ever show in Jammu and Kashmir is bound to blunt detractors’ claim that the BJP’s grip was loosening over its supporters and brings into sharp focus its organisational efficiency and its leadership’s keen ability to redraw strategy in line with the changing ground dynamics.

As the party prepares to fight other challenging state elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand in a few weeks, this win will provide it much-needed momentum. It will bolster its hopes of another come-from-behind victory, more so in the western state as the opposition INDIA Bloc had inflicted a big defeat on the BJP-led alliance in the Lok Sabha elections.

With Hooda’s influence dominant in the state Congress and the party’s other satraps like Kumari Selja pushed to the background, the BJP upped its ground game as its leaders, including poll in-charge and Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan, held meetings with various communities and successfully tapped in the state’s traditional faultline of Jat versus non-Jat politics. 

The resentment of vocal Jats and a section of Dalits with the BJP dominated the narrative but the results demonstrated that the relatively muted majority of Other Backward Classes and poorer sections of Dalits besides the “upper castes” rallied behind the ruling party.

The Congress, which managed 39.06 per cent vote share, had built its poll narrative around unemployment, farmers’ demand for a legal guarantee to minimum support price, the Agnipath military recruitment scheme and inflation in order to target the BJP’s 10-year tenure.

However, BJP leaders including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah countered the Congress party’s offensive with the transparent system of providing government jobs and guaranteed and pensionable job for an Agniveer hailing from Haryana.