It is not the kind of Diwali which the BJP wanted in Haryana. Riding high on the slogan of “over 75 this time” and abrogation of Article 370, the saffron party was reduced to 40 seats — 7 less than it won in the last Assembly polls — with a resurgent Opposition gaining strength due to agrarian crisis and growing unemployment.
In a hung verdict, which has opened the doors for backdoor negotiations and new political realignments, several new political possibilities of Government formation emerged and the BJP clearly has the advantage with the numbers.
In the new Assembly, the BJP remains the single largest party and would stake its claim to form a Government. However, the biggest riddle for the party would be to get the requisite numbers to get a majority in the 90-member House. In such a scenario, the fledgling Jananayak Janata Party (JJP) holds the key.
The JJP — the surprise package this election and the true inheritors of the legacy of Jat leader Chaudhary Devi Lal — would take a call on extending support on Friday.
Government sources indicated that Governor Satyadev Narayan Arya would invite the single largest party BJP to form the Government and the fractured mandate notwithstanding, the party’s Chief Minister would be sworn in. It will be only after being sworn in that the backstage managers of the BJP would become active to get support from the JJP, smaller parties and the Independents to prove majority on the floor of the House.
Given the fractured verdict, a section of the BJP is contemplating whether Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar is the best bet at this point of time to lead the party. His rainbow coalition of non-Jat castes following the violent Jat protests of 2016 lies shattered to an extent this time around.
Barely five months ago in the Lok Sabha election, the BJP had swept Haryana winning all 10 seats. Now its vote share has dipped by over 20 per cent.
Political observers here felt that after playing the non-Jat card consistently over a period of five years and consolidating other castes, the dominant caste voted “strategically” in this election giving the Congress and the JJP significant seats in the Jat belt of the State at the cost of the BJP.
How angry the Jat voters were for their perceived marginalisation in BJP regime can be gauged that all the three prominent Jat leaders of BJP — Ministers Capt Abhimanyu and Om Prakash Dhankar, along with State BJP president Subhash Barala, lost the polls.
In such a scenario, political observers said there could be thinking about a leadership reshuffle in the BJP with a Jat leader replacing the Punjabi Khattar to change the political and caste dynamics of the State. Of course, the riddle would be to find a tall Jat leader and presently the BJP has none with three of the only popular faces of the party facing defeat in the elections. But despite the mild shock, it would not be feasible for the BJP to change its non-Jat centric social equations overnight and form new caste coalition. Upsetting the settled caste equations and tweaking it to its own advantage has been the USP of BJP for a while in several States and it would not like to change it after one result which is not as per its expectations.
Besides the Jats, the other caste which got alienated from the BJP in the election were the Dalits, having significant presence in the Kalka, Panchkula, Yamunanagar belt where the saffron party performed below par as compared to the 2014 polls. While Congress appointing Selja as the State party president from this belt could be a factor, this alone cannot explain it in entirety. The BJP would be introspecting what went wrong here, perhaps a combination of economic factors, failure to address the concerns of the Dalit community, or identifying itself with the causes of the community through a network of its own leaders.
What became clear in the elections was the fact that voters in the State clearly differentiated between a national or Lok Sabha election held five months ago and the Assembly polls and had different voting preferences. The BJP steadfastly made abrogation of Article 370 a poll issue in a State where the numbers of ex-servicemen and serving personnel in Army and paramilitary forces is quite high. But the issue failed to enthuse the voters as the party had expected with local issues like caste consolidation, high unemployment rate and better remuneration for crops dominating the political discourse of the Opposition. “Who is opposing abrogation of Article 370? It’s now the law of the land. Why are you (BJP) raising it” We are in support of it,” Congress leader Bhupinder Singh Hooda kept saying in one meeting after the other, blunting the single most important issue of the BJP in the elections.
As the number of religious minorities in terms of percentage is not that significant in the State, emotional and religious issues which BJP calls as “nationalistic issues” like verbal bashing of Pakistan, triple talaq, building of Ram temple in Ayodhya etc were not raised much in the campaign in the run-up to the polls.
Despite the Prime Minister and BJP president Amit Shah hailing the performance of Khattar and describing the fractured mandate as a victory, what is clear is that Haryana result is a wake-up call for the BJP if it wants to consolidate its position in the State where it came to power on its own for the first time in 2014 in the backdrop of Modi wave sweeping the entire country.
Of course, the Modi wave again swept the country as well as Haryana in May 2019 but in the interregnum of five years in the State, factors like Government performance, economic crisis, caste consolidation, unemployment, arrogant approach - all combined to bring down the confidence of the BJP. “It’s time to rebuild…after Government formation,” summed up a senior party leader.