Haryana assembly polls: BJP looks at gains, opposition hopes for a miracle

NEW DELHI: The BJP is looking at gains in southern Haryana and the Jat belt while retaining its grip on the northern region as the state goes to the polls on Monday, with the opposition in disarray and hoping for a miracle to stop the ruling party’s juggernaut.

Haryana Congress leaders Kumari Selja and Deepender Hooda put up a strong face on Sunday claiming that the people of Haryana would elect the Congress to power but the main opposition to the BJP seems to be coming from the Dushyant Chautala-led JJP, which is laying claim to the Jat vote.

Senior state BJP leaders, however, told ET that while the JJP might gain a respectable vote share, it would not end up winning enough seats to challenge the BJP, and that the Congress tally would not cross single digits. The Congress, INLD and JJP are all claimants to the Jat vote in the region extending from Sonipat to Sirsa and any division goes in the favour of the BJP, said party leaders in the state.

Turning the election into one focused mainly on nationalistic issues such as scrapping of the Article 370, the BJP is betting on a repeat of the Lok Sabha election in the state just four months ago when it won all 10 Lok Sabha seats and took a lead in as many as 79 out of the 90 assembly segments in the state.

In the Lok Sabha polls, the party swept all assembly segments in six Lok Sabha seats - Karnal, Ambala, Kurukshetra, Sirsa, Bhiwani-Mahendragarh and Faridabad. It lost the three assembly segments in Mewat - Nuh, Punhana and Ferozepur

Jhirka - but it is aiming for a turnaround this time by bringing the winning MLAs into its fold. The BJP is expected to sweep northern Haryana, where it won 22 out of 27 seats in 2014 polls.

Both the Congress and the JJP are fighting this election mainly on the issue of rampant unemployment in Haryana and both have promised an unemployment allowance of Rs 11,000 in their manifesto. CM Manohar Lal has tried to counter it by highlighting government jobs given in a transparent manner and promising skill training for selfemployment.

However, both the Congress and JJP have a mountain to climb given the fact that Congress candidates lost their deposits in 37 seats in the last election while the JJP lacks a state-wide appeal.

The BJP faced some dissent in its ranks as it denied tickets to 12 out of the 48 sitting MLAs, including two ministers, and it may suffer some damage from rebels on a few seats.

The visibility of the BJP campaign in Haryana has been significantly higher than that of the opposition, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi doing seven rallies in the state, including four in the Jat belt on the last two days of campaigning.

CM Manohar Lal did more than 75 rallies after Dussehra and earlier a Jan Ashirwaad Yatra across the state, while Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh and Yogi Adityanath did a total of nearly 25 rallies.

In contrast, the Congress troika of Gandhis has largely stayed away from Haryana, with Rahul Gandhi doing just two rallies and both of them were not attended by the party’s purported CM face, Bhupinder Singh Hooda. Gandhi had continued to back Hooda’s adversary Ashok Tanwar as party state chief before the latter was removed last month.