THE 2024 HARYANA ASSEMBLY ELECTION EXPLAINED
Ajachi Chakrabarti
The elections to the fifteenth Haryana Vidhan Sabha, held on 5 October, provided the first opportunity to see if the Bharatiya Janata Party is indeed losing its grip over parts of the Hindi heartland, as indicated by the general election earlier this year. The BJP came to power, for the first time in the state’s history, in 2014, a few months after Narendra Modi was first elected prime minister.
Having been re-elected, five years later—albeit in a coalition with the Jananayak Janata Party—the state government, led by Manohar Lal Khattar, came under fire due to two decisions of the national party: the three controversial farm laws and the refusal to prosecute the party’s Uttar Pradesh MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh after he was accused, while president of the Wrestling Federation of India, of widespread sexual misconduct.
As a primarily agrarian state that regularly contributes the bulk of India’s wrestling contingent at the Olympics, and neighbours Delhi, Haryana was ground zero for both agitations that ensued. In an attempt to ward off anti-incumbency with a new face, the BJP replaced its chief minister of nine years, Manohar Lal Khattar, in March, with Nayab Singh Saini, the first member of the state’s Backward Classes to hold the post since Rao Birender Singh, an Ahir, ruled for eight months in 1967.
A resurgent Congress, which won five of Haryana’s ten Lok Sabha seats this year after drawing a blank in 2019, sought to capitalise on a political realignment in the state that had resulted in the dominant Jat community consolidating its support behind the party. Bhupinder Singh Hooda, who was chief minister from 2005 to 2014, has strengthened his family’s grip over the party and appears poised to secure a third term if Saini is unable to hold on to Khattar’s non-Jat social coalition and if the decline of the Indian National Lok Dal and its offshoot, the JJP, is as terminal as recent trends have indicated. Even the entry of the Aam Aadmi Party—which runs governments in neighbouring Punjab and Delhi, and whose candidates won 15 zila parishad seats in the 2022 panchayat elections—does not seem to have made much impact in a highly polarised contest.
Election History
Politics in Haryana have traditionally revolved around a few feuding dynasties, most of which originated in the Congress but went on to play key roles in the various national alternatives that arose over the years. The small size of the legislative assembly meant that it took a relatively small number of defections to topple the state government—a trend that came to be known as “Aaya Ram Gaya Ram,” after the legislator Gaya Lal, who changed parties thrice in a fortnight in 1967. Hooda and Khattar were the first two chief ministers to complete full five-year terms without being unseated or having to face an early election. But it was the assertion of the Jats, who make up a quarter of the population and benefited greatly from the Green Revolution, assuming a leading role in the new agrarian politics, that came to define the battle lines of Haryana’s electoral history.
In the early years of the state, which was carved out of Punjab in 1966, the Haryana Congress entered a period of prolonged infighting over the chief minister’s post, with Bansi Lal, a Jat, eventually prevailing after the 1972 assembly election. His rival Jat leader Devi Lal left the party before that election and played a key role in Janata politics after the Emergency and eventually set up what came to be known as the INLD. Bhajan Lal, a Bishnoi leader who had also defected to the Janata Party and succeeded Devi Lal as chief minister, returned to the Congress after Indira Gandhi’s victory in the 1980 general election. He and Bansi Lal spent the next few years fighting over control of the party, allowing Devi Lal and his son Om Prakash Chautala to step in as chief minister after the 1987 assembly election.
On returning as chief minister, in 1991, Bhajan Lal sought to cobble together a viable non-Jat alliance, rejecting the demand for Jat reservations and appointing a Backward Classes commission that bestowed BC status on Ahirs, Gujjars, Lodhs and Sainis. However, the Congress was reduced to just nine seats in the 1996 election, as first Bansi Lal, who had left the party to set up the Haryana Vikas Party, and then Om Prakash Chautala maintained Jat control over the government for the next nine years. Although the Congress won the 2005 election, Bhupinder Hooda—another Jat, who had defeated Devi Lal for the Rohtak Lok Sabha seat thrice in a row during the 1990s—was named chief minister, leading Bhajan Lal to quit the party as well. Hooda had promised to implement Jat reservations and, after the National Commission on Backward Classes ruled, in February 2014, that the community did not meet its backwardness criteria, his government carved out a new designation of Special Backward Classes, which included Jats, Jutt Sikhs, Bishnois, Rors and Tyagis, and would be given a ten-percent quota.
It was the BJP that finally broke the Jats’ hold over Haryana politics. In 2014, the party won seven of the ten Lok Sabha seats before securing a majority in the state assembly, with 47 of the 90 seats. The Modi wave and the Congress’s historic unpopularity—especially among the upper castes—helped, as did the fragmentation of Jat votes between the Congress and the INLD.
In the assembly election, the BJP averaged a vote share of around forty percent in four of the state’s eight electoral regions: Ambala, the GT Road belt, the National Capital Region and Ahirwal. The first three form the most urbanised part of the state, a corridor linking the suburbs of Delhi and Chandigarh in which most of Haryana’s upper castes reside, as do large sections of the BC and Dalit populations. Ahirwal, meanwhile, is a swathe of southern Haryana with a large Ahir, or Yadav, population. The BJP won 34 of the 41 seats in these four regions, but only 13 of the 44 seats in the three Jat-dominated regions of Deswal (Rohtak, Jhajjar and the more rural parts of Panipat and Sonipat districts), Bagad (Hisar, Sirsa and Bhiwani) and Bangar (Jind and Kaithal), and none of the five seats in Mewat, which has a high Muslim population. The party, which had received less than a fifth of the Jat vote in both 2014 elections, named Khattar and Anil Vij, both members of the Punjabi Khatri community, as well as Ram Bilas Sharma, a Brahmin from Ahirwal, as its seniormost ministers and gave several key government positions, such as the director general of police and the chief secretary, to non-Jats.
The Jats responded to their loss of political power by intensifying their agitation for BC status, especially after the Punjab and Haryana High Court struck down Hooda’s SBC proposal, which the Khattar government had enacted, in 2016. There were several cases of caste-based violence in the state, with Nayab Singh Saini, who was the MP from Kurukshetra at the time, reportedly threatening to set up an OBC army and crush Jats like Maoists. The hostility did not significantly affect the 2019 general election in the state—riding another nationwide Modi wave, the BJP swept all ten Lok Sabha seats, with almost sixty percent of the vote, and led in 79 of the 90 assembly segments. But that year’s assembly election, with Modi not on the ticket, threw up a very different picture.
The primary catalyst for the upheavals of the assembly election was Om Prakash Chautala’s grandson Dushyant, who had been expelled from the INLD after feuding with his uncle Abhay. In December 2018, Dushyant had formed the JJP, named after Devi Lal’s popular title. He was the only party candidate to keep their deposit in the 2019 general election, despite losing his Hisar seat—which he had won, in 2014, at the age of 26, becoming the youngest MP in Indian history—by over three hundred thousand votes. However, in the assembly election, the JJP won ten seats with almost fifteen percent of the total vote.
Most of the JJP’s successes were centred on the Chautalas’ home turf, around Jind and Hisar. It was only in the Bangar and Bagad regions that the JJP vote share was roughly equal to the fall in INLD support. However, Abhay Chautala’s party had collapsed throughout the state, with its overall vote share falling from 24.1 percent, in 2014, to 2.4 percent. This collapse allowed both national parties significant room to grow. The BJP only lost vote share in Ambala and Ahirwal, where it remained the largest party by some distance, while the Congress grew in all eight regions, improving its vote share by more than ten percentage points in Ambala, the GT Road belt and Mewat. Hooda was able to ensure that the Congress won 11 of the 12 seats in his family bastion of Deswal, and the two parties equally split Ambala’s ten seats, while the BJP lost some of its dominance over Ahirwal and the GT Road belt. This meant that, despite gaining seven seats from the INLD, the BJP tally fell by seven, and Khattar lost his majority. He was able to retain power by forming a coalition with the JJP.
Having decided to tie up with the party it had vehemently opposed before the election, Dushyant, who was named deputy chief minister, suffered the same fate that unlikely BJP allies have faced in recent years. Half of the JJP’s assembly caucus ended up rebelling and supporting the BJP, while the party lost much of its credibility among Jats, especially after remaining in government throughout the farmers’ and wrestlers’ agitations. In 2023, the JJP sought to participate in the Rajasthan assembly election, but the BJP refused to accommodate it. It put up 19 candidates anyway—including in three segments of Devi Lal’s old Sikar Lok Sabha seat—and all of them lost their deposits. Both parties remained noncommittal about contesting the two Haryana elections of 2024 together, insisting that theirs was an alliance of convenience rather than of complementary ideologies. On 13 March this year, after seat-sharing discussions broke down, the BJP broke the alliance and replaced Khattar with Saini, signalling a return to the politics of Jats versus non-Jats.
The general election, two months later, confirmed the JJP’s declining prospects. All ten candidates of the party lost their deposits, trailed in every assembly segment and combined for a vote share of just 0.87 percent, which was lower than that managed by both the INLD and the Bahujan Samaj Party—which put up seven and nine candidates, respectively—as well as by the None of the Above option. Dushyant’s mother, Naina, who was running in the Hisar Lok Sabha constituency, could only manage 4,210 votes in her son’s assembly constituency of Uchana Kalan.
Once again, both national parties benefitted from the regional party’s collapse, as Haryana’s notoriously multipolar election contests—often characterised by independents and minor parties doing well in pockets—became more or less a direct head-to-head contest. The BJP and the Congress–AAP alliance combined for 93.6 percent of the vote. They each won five Lok Sabha seats, leading in 44 and 46 assembly segments, respectively.
The BJP gained vote share in seven of the eight regions, as compared to the 2019 assembly election, losing 6.4 percentage points in Mewat, which, following last year’s communal violence, the Congress swept with almost seventy percent of the vote. The Congress led in 16 of the 21 assembly segments and won a majority of the votes in Bagad—the semi-fertile region on the borders of Punjab and Rajasthan, where agrarian distress is more common, had been the epicentre of the farmers’ protests in the state. It also retained its dominance in Deswal, where it gained almost twenty points to finish with a vote share of over sixty percent, allowing Bhupinder Hooda’s son Deepender to win the Rohtak Lok Sabha seat by almost three hundred and fifty thousand votes. Meanwhile, the BJP won simple majorities in Ahirwal, the GT Road belt and the NCR, leading in 28 of the 31 assembly segments in the three regions. Ambala and Bangar remained tight contests, with the Congress–AAP alliance narrowly ahead in terms of both vote share and assembly segments.
According to the post-election survey by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, the Congress won nearly two-thirds of the Jat vote, while the BJP retained similar levels of support among the upper castes. However, a key factor was the Congress winning majorities among both BC and SC voters, with thirty-point swings away from the BJP in both categories, as compared to the previous Lok Sabha election. The assembly election, it appears, will hinge on whether the Hoodas can keep the two Chautala factions in the margins and on whether Saini can restore the BJP’s dominance among BC voters.
Contenders
There are five distinct groupings contesting the 2024 assembly election. The BJP has sought to cement its narrative of a fresh start by denying tickets to nearly forty percent of its incumbents, including Ram Bilas Sharma. This triggered a few defections, and Karan Dev Kamboj, a BC leader from Karnal and former junior minister in Khattar’s first government, alleged, after also being denied a ticket, that Saini had not been allowed much input in the selection of candidates. (Kamboj eventually defected to the Congress.) Over a third of the BJP’s candidates are from the upper castes, including 11 Brahmins and 11 Khatris, and 22 are from BCs. As my colleagues Sunil Kashyap and Shahid Tantray point out in their report from Haryana, most of the BC candidates are from the four landowning castes who were given backward status by Bhajan Lal, but the party has individually reached out to most of the smaller BC communities—which would be classified as Extremely Backward Classes in other states—over the years, in keeping with its social-engineering campaign in the rest of the Hindi heartland.
The Congress could not conclude a seat-sharing agreement with the AAP but gave the Bhiwani seat to the Communist Party of India (Marxist). In keeping with its new status as the primary Jat party, it has nominated 28 members of the community, while the CPI(M) candidate is also a Jat. This has fuelled resentment among members of other castes as well as intraparty dissent, with the former union minister and the Congress’s Dalit face in the state, Selja, who handily won the Sirsa Lok Sabha seat earlier this year, initially staying aloof from the campaign and expressing her dissatisfaction with the distribution of tickets, although she insisted that she was a loyal soldier of the party. The national leadership has sought to keep its house in order by refusing to name a candidate for chief minister, but both Hoodas remain heavy frontrunners, with their loyalist Udai Bhan, Gaya Lal’s son and the president of the state party, expected to be a contender if the high command wants a Dalit chief minister.
Marginalising Selja could come to hurt the Congress in a state where Dalits make up a fifth of the electorate, of which her Jatav community is the largest. Both the INLD and JJP took cognisance of this fact, and of the necessity of diversifying their social coalitions after their recent setbacks, by tying up with Ambedkarite parties. The INLD contested is contesting only 51 seats and has given 35 to the BSP, with which it had joined hands for ten months, in 2018, before the Chautala family drama broke both the party and the alliance. It has also extended support to the controversial entrepreneur Gopal Kanda in Sirsa, as has the BJP. The JJP, which has ruled out any future alliance with the BJP, has tied up with another upstart outfit, the Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram), with the two parties contesting 66 and 12 seats, respectively. The BSP and ASP(KR) are expected to be significant factors in the Yamunanagar district, which, like the neighbouring Saharanpur district in Uttar Pradesh, has a large Dalit population. Both parties are contesting three of the four seats in the district.
The AAP has a marginal presence in Haryana, despite its leader, Arvind Kejriwal, campaigning as a son of the soil. It lost all 46 seats it contested in the 2019 assembly election, receiving fewer cumulative votes than the NOTA option. In the 2024 general election, the party’s state president, Sushil Gupta, contested the Kurukshetra Lok Sabha seat, losing to his fellow industrialist Navin Jindal by close to thirty thousand votes and leading in four of the nine assembly segments, but this performance relied on Congress support. After its demand for around ten seats was rejected, Kejriwal addressed 23 campaign rallies in 11 districts, claiming that no party would be able to form a government without the AAP’s support. However, the lack of a robust party organisation means that it is likely to influence the result only in seats bordering Delhi and Punjab.
Issues
The spectre of the farmers’ protest continues to haunt the BJP, with agrarian communities throughout the state demanding greater protections from the free market. The most potent demand is an extension of the minimum support prices, which, farmers believe, is necessary for them to diversify beyond rice and wheat. While the BJP has pledged to continue procuring 24 crops at MSP, the Congress and JJP promise to enact a legal guarantee for the practice. Both the Congress and the AAP have also promised free electricity to residents of the state.
The wrestlers’ protest also remains a highly emotive issue for Jats, with the Olympian Vinesh Phogat having entered the fray in Jind district’s Julana seat as a Congress candidate, and her fellow wrestler Bajrang Punia also joining the party. After Phogat’s candidature was announced, the BJP leader Gian Chand Gupta and the current WFI president, Sanjay Singh, accused Bhupinder Hooda of orchestrating the protests and ensuring that she received special treatment while preparing for the Paris Olympics. Phogat has used her campaign to advocate for women’s safety in this highly patriarchal state, while the Congress has promised a monthly stipend of Rs 2,000 to all women between the ages of 18 and 60.
A third major cause of public anger, in a state that has served as one of the biggest recruitment pools for the armed forces, is the Modi government’s Agnipath scheme, which offers a four-year deployment without the pension benefits enjoyed by regular soldiers. The BJP president, JP Nadda, said, on Kargil Vijay Divas this year, that central and state governments were working to ensure that all former Agniveers are absorbed by the police and paramilitary forces, but the public response is tied to the wider fears of unemployment. Both the BJP and the Congress have promised hundreds of thousands of new jobs. The latter has offered to do so through direct recruitment by the government, while the BJP’s plans include an apprenticeship scheme and incentives for businesses that operate in its ten proposed new industrial towns to hire local workers. As in other states, the Congress has vowed to return to the old pension scheme for government employees and promised pensions to all widows, senior citizens and people with disabilities.
In order to appeal to BC voters, the Congress has promised to conduct a caste survey in the state and increase the income threshold for the creamy layer in reservations to Rs 10 lakh. In July, the BJP increased the threshold from Rs 6 lakh to Rs 8 lakh—the level currently mandated by the union government—and expanded reservations for BCs in panchayats. Among Dalits, the Congress, the BSP and the ASP(KR) have significant Jatav support, but the BJP will be looking to keep the inroads it has made in recent years among other Dalit communities, particularly Valmikis and Dhanaks. In August, the state’s SC commission recommended the bifurcation of the 20-percent SC quota in order to prioritise 36 communities that are classified as Deprived Scheduled Castes, another legacy of the Bhajan Lal government of the early 1990s. While DSC reservations were struck down by the Supreme Court, in 2006, the recent decision of a seven-judge constitution bench to allow subcategorisation has cleared the path. The Saini government was unable to implement the recommendations, since the model code of conduct was in effect, but various DSC communities that have been agitating for such a bifurcation might be galvanised to back the ruling party.
Ajachi Chakrabarti is the associate editor at The Caravan.
https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/2024-haryana-assembly-election-explained. Please consider supporting and subscribing to Caravan.
Top - Home