The three-year-old alliance between Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC) and BJP in Haryana is almost over and a formal announcement is expected to take place on Thursday.
Haryana Janhit Congress chief Kuldeep Bishnoi has called a Press conference at Chandigarh apparently for making the announcement of a break-up. “It is enough. We are fed up with the attitude of senior BJP leaders, who have no time to discuss seat-sharing formula for State Assembly elections in Haryana,” said Devi lal Bishnoi, media in-charge of the HJC.
He alleged that party chief Kuldeep Bishnoi had been waiting for a formal meeting with BJP chief Amit Shah for the last 15 days at Delhi, but Shah did not spare time. “Under these circumstances, we are being forced to take this harsh decision at eleventh hour,” added Bishnoi.
The relations between the two parties had been started turning sour after the results of recent general elections in which HJC had failed to retain even its party chief’s seat of Hisar and had lost both Hisar and Sirsa seats. On the contrary, its ally BJP had won seven out of eight seats it contested.
Bishnoi had straight-away rejected the request of BJP to reconsider the seat-sharing formula of 45-45 for the State Assembly polls in Haryana, which are due in October, even after the clear mandate of the people Bishnoi continued to stick to the poll pact of 2011 with seat sharing formula of 8:2 for lok Sabha elections and 45:45 for Assembly elections, besides chief ministerial post for first two and half years to him, if the alliance was voted to power.
Bishnoi had also started series of ‘Parivartan’ rallies across Haryana without taking its ally BJP in to confidence. He also remained absent from the BJP rallies and didn’t even attend three important rallies of Amit Shah at Mahendergarh and Jind and Narendra Modi at Kaithal earlier this month.
Moreover, Bishnoi used to announce on public forum that his party would contest all 90 seats alone which further worsened the relationship between the two parties.
The poll pact between the HJC and BJP took place in 2011 with the efforts of Sushma Swaraj, when Nitin Gadkari was the national president of BJP. In the new power equation, Swaraj has little say as Shah and Modi call the shots in the party.