Gurugram: Former Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar was among the BJP MPs sworn in as cabinet ministers Sunday along with the swearing-in ceremony of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, officiated by President Droupadi Murmu.
Khattar’s induction as a cabinet minister was a foregone conclusion, expected ever since he was elected as an MP from Karnal, defeating former National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) leader Divyanshu Budhiraja of the Congress.
The buzz in the political circles was that Khattar would either replace J.P. Nadda as the BJP President or be accommodated in the Modi 3.0 Cabinet due to his proximity to the PM, a fact publicly acknowledged by Modi on 11 March this year.
While inaugurating the newly constructed Dwarka Expressway in Gurugram on 11 March, Modi reminisced about his old association with Khattar since the late 1990s, when Modi was in charge of Haryana affairs and Khattar was BJP’s organising secretary in the state. Modi said he often rode pillion on Khattar’s motorcycle for his frequent travels from Rohtak to Gurugram.
A day later, Khattar was replaced as Haryana CM by Kurukshetra MP Nayab Singh Saini and the former CM was named the BJP’s candidate from Karnal.
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2-time CM who digitised governance
Khattar comes from a humble farming background. His family migrated from Pakistan’s Punjab state to Nindana village in Rohtak after the 1947 partition, where he was born in 1954.
He became the first CM of Haryana from the Punjabi community, which settled in various districts of Haryana after migrating from Pakistan.
Khattar served as the CM of Haryana for two consecutive terms — from October 2014 to October 2019 and then from October 2019 till 12 March, 2024, when Saini replaced him and the BJP severed its four-and-half-year alliance with Dushyant Chautala’s Jannayak Janta Party (JJP).
Khattar, 70, comes from an RSS background. He was named general secretary (organisation) of the BJP for Haryana in the mid-1990s, when the party was in government in Haryana in alliance with Bansi Lal’s Haryana Vikas Party as its junior partner. Modi was in charge of Haryana in the BJP and the two developed a camaraderie.
Because of this old friendship, Modi handpicked Khattar to lead the first BJP government in Haryana in October 2014, months after becoming PM.
Khattar — a bachelor known for his simplicity, clean image, and a knack for computers — has made significant strides in digitising governance during his tenure as CM. His initiatives include online transfers of teachers, the implementation of family and property IDs, and the introduction of e-tendering for development project allocations, among others.
However, some of these measures sparked unrest against the BJP with sarpanches opposing e-tendering, and urban residents viewing Property IDs as a source of significant corruption.
Because of Haryana’s location, Khattar was responsible for stopping Punjab farmers from heading to Delhi, first in November 2020 and then again in February this year. This role led to significant anger from farmers in Haryana during the parliamentary polls.
Controversies
The former CM has had his fair share of controversies during his nine-and-a-half-year term.
When the Modi government abrogated Article 370 in August 2019, Khattar’s video went viral in which he purportedly said that now, Haryanvi youths can bring brides from Kashmir, leading to criticism from Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. Khattar later clarified in a post on X that his comment was meant in jest.
In April last year, Khattar’s remark on a High Court judge needing “fixing” sparked a political row with the Opposition accusing him of influencing the judiciary.
A video from Khattar’s Jan Samvad in Kharak Kalan village of Bhiwani went viral, showing him assuring job aspirants concerned about recruitment delays due to court cases.
In that video, the CM was heard saying, “Wo hal ho jaayegi, chinta mat karo. Ek judge hai. Uske maathe mein kuchh gadbad hai. Theek karenge usko (Don’t worry, that issue will be resolved. There is one judge who has a problem. We will fix him)”. He later said regretted his remarks.
In November 2018, his remark that in 80 to 90 percent of rape cases, the victim and the accused are known to each other and the victims lodges a complaint of rape when something goes wrong in their relationship, drew a lot of criticism.
During another Jan Samvad at Hisar in September last year, Khattar mocked a poor woman who wanted a factory opened in her area for jobs for women and said he would send her on Chandrayaan-4 when it goes, and asked her to sit down.
He had once also dismissed a woman in Sirsa seeking justice for her son, who had died from drugs, and accused her of being influenced by Opposition parties.
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)
Also read: ‘Jobs on merit, no bribery’ — in Karnal, Khattar makes a poll pitch based on 9-yr record as CM