Gurugram: It was supposed to be a routine public meeting ahead of a municipal election. Rajya Sabha MP Rekha Sharma took the stage in Panchkula’s Sector 5 to drum up support for the BJP’s mayoral candidate Shyam Lal Bansal. CM Nayab Singh Saini sat behind her on the dais. What followed would consume Haryana’s political conversation for days.
“Shyam Lal Bansal has seen the time when there was Congress’s badmashi (criminality/thuggery) here,” Sharma told the gathering on 24 April. “When there was badmashi of Bhajan Lal and Chander Mohan. They won elections purely through badmashi.”
Her remarks set off a political storm. The Haryana BJP president Sunday publicly distanced the party from Sharma’s remarks; Bhajan Lal’s sons responded with couplets and courtroom threats; and the Bishnoi community of Hisar summoned an emergency meeting.
Rekha Sharma appeared to briefly stumble over the name “Bansi Lal” before correcting herself, a slip that did not go unnoticed. She later told the media that she had referred to the 1996 Kalka Assembly election in which Bansal had contested against Chander Mohan, Bhajan Lal’s elder son.
“Shyam Lal Bansal was defeated through badmashi and deceit in 1996,” she said, adding that Bansil Lal’s name “slipped out by mistake” since Bansi Lal had in fact contested that election alongside the BJP.
Panchkula was part of the Kalka Assembly seat then. While Bhajan Lal was chief minister from 1991 to 1996, Bansi Lal’s Haryana Vikas Party was in alliance with the BJP.
In the 1996 Kalka election, Chander Mohan polled 54,929 votes against Bansal’s 34,300. Bansal also lost to Chander Mohan in 2000 and 2005.
The family hits back
Chander Mohan, now a Congress MLA from Panchkula, moved swiftly. He dispatched a legal notice to Sharma demanding a public apology within seven days, failing which he would pursue legal action.
In the notice, he argued that if elections had been won through criminality, the public would not have elected him five times, and authorities would have acted on complaints.
He noted that he had won in 2000, 2005, 2019, and 2024, several of those victories coming when Congress itself was not in power in Haryana, making any suggestion of ruling-party muscle impossible to sustain.
“My father served as chief minister of Haryana three times and played a central role in the state’s formation and development,” the notice stated. “He is no longer with us. What MP Rekha Sharma said at a public election rally was a deliberate attempt to tarnish our family’s image, contrary to the norms of democracy and social propriety.”
Bhajan Lal’s younger son, Kuldeep Bishnoi, a BJP leader since 2022 after years in the HJC and Congress, chose verse. He posted on X without naming anyone: “Hum samandar hain, humein khamosh rehne do, zara machal gaye toh sheher le doobenge.”
(We are an ocean, let us stay silent; if we stir even a little, we will drown the city)
His son Bhavya Bishnoi, the Adampur MLA from 2022 to 2024 before losing to Congress’s Chander Parkash in October 2024, was more pointed.
Quoting a Hindi proverb, “Bandar kya jaane adrak ka swaad,” (what does a monkey know of the taste of ginger) he wrote that he was commenting on people with “no experience and no popular base”, adding pointedly that Bhajan Lal won elections across decades while some people became Rajya Sabha MPs “by mercy”.
BJP distances, Opposition piles on
On Sunday, answering a question by media at Panchkula, Haryana BJP chief Mohan Lal Badoli was at pains to say Rekha Sharma’s remarks were “her personal view, not the party’s”.
Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) leader Abhay Singh Chautala said in a post on X: “Bhajan Lal ji is no longer among us, and making such comments about him at this time is not only inappropriate but extremely unfortunate for Haryana’s political traditions.”
He trained equal fire on “those leaders who remained silent on the stage,” a clear reference to CM Saini, saying all such individuals should apologise publicly.
Former state minister Sampat Singh went further, writing on X that “MP Rekha Sharma’s refusal to apologise and BJP’s silence clearly indicates this was pre-planned”. He warned that if a personality of Bhajan Lal’s stature could be maligned today, Haryana’s other icons would face the same treatment tomorrow.
Congress Rajya Sabha MP Randeep Singh Surjewala and Rohtak MP Deepender Singh Hooda also condemned the remarks. Hooda wrote that “every Haryanvi has been deeply shocked” by the language used by someone representing the state in the Upper House.
BJP MLA Randhir Panihar, who is close to Kuldeep Bishnoi, told mediapersons at Hisar on Sunday that he was “extremely surprised” and would raise the matter with CM Saini, party president Badoli, and the central leadership. “Senior leaders like Rekha Sharma should think before making such comments. Across the entire country, people have deep reverence for Chaudhary Bhajan Lal and Bansi Lal.”
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Not the first time
The current uproar has brought back into circulation a year-old episode involving Union Minister Manohar Lal Khattar.
During the April 2024 Lok Sabha campaign, at a rally in Hisar’s Kamri village for BJP candidate Ranjit Chautala, Khattar had narrated an anecdote, without naming anyone, about a man who complained to a former chief minister in Chandigarh that a patwari had taken a Rs 100 bribe for a land record copy. The leader, in Khattar’s telling, reprimanded the man: if you could get your work done by paying Rs 100 bribe, why did you waste Rs 200 and two days coming to Chandigarh?
“This was the mentality of Haryana’s leaders earlier,” Khattar had said. The Bishnoi family believed, and said publicly, that the nameless leader was Bhajan Lal.
Kuldeep Bishnoi had responded then by saying Khattar had left out the ending.
The truth, he said, was that Bhajan Lal had given the man Rs 400 from his own pocket and suspended the bribe-taking patwari. “Chaudhary Bhajan Lal was a people’s leader and a people’s chief minister. He could not do wrong.”
From Bahawalpur to Haryana’s corridors of power
To understand why these words landed with such force, one must understand the weight the Bhajan Lal name still carries in Haryana, and the arc of a political dynasty that dominated the state for more than four decades.
Bhajan Lal was born on 6 October 1930 in Koranwali village in Bahawalpur, in what is now Pakistan. His family migrated to Hisar after Partition in 1947. He tried his hand at grain trading before entering politics in the 1960s through the Indian National Congress, leveraging his Bishnoi community connections and a businessman’s instinct for reading rooms and cutting deals.
He was first elected to the Haryana Legislative Assembly from Adampur in 1968, the same seat his son and grandson would hold half a century later. He rose quickly, serving as a minister under chief minister Bansi Lal. But his defining moment came in 1979 in an episode that would cement his reputation as Haryana’s supreme political tactician.
When the Janata Party government of Devi Lal collapsed, Bhajan Lal, first became chief minister dislodging Devi Lal, and when Congress under Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1980, Bhajan Lal engineered perhaps the most audacious defection in Haryana’s history, leading the entire Cabinet to switch to Congress overnight. It was a manoeuvre that crystallised the “Aaya Ram, Gaya Ram” culture that the state had already become infamous for. His admirers called it political genius. His detractors called it opportunism.
He served three terms as chief minister: 1979–80, 1980–85, and 1991–96, a cumulative 11 years and 300 days. Between stints as chief minister, he was elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1986 and served as Union Minister for Agriculture and Environment and Forests in Rajiv Gandhi’s cabinet. In 1989 he won a Lok Sabha seat from Faridabad. In 2009, already in the twilight of his career, he won from Hisar.
His final break with Congress came in 2007 when the high command chose Bhupinder Singh Hooda as chief minister in 2005, bypassing Bhajan Lal. He founded the Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC), a regional outfit that for a time posed a credible challenge to both Congress and INLD. It never quite delivered on its promise. Bhajan Lal died on June 3, 2011. The dynasty he built has been trying, with diminishing success, to survive him.
Kuldeep Bishnoi merged his HJC with the Congress in 2016, only to quit the party and join the BJP in 2022.
What the family won, and lost
If one counts every election victory by a member of the Bhajan Lal family, the tally is difficult to match in Haryana. Bhajan Lal himself won from Adampur repeatedly, held a Rajya Sabha seat, and won three Lok Sabha seats. His wife, Jasma Devi, was elected MLA in 1987. Elder son Chander Mohan has been an MLA five times and served as deputy chief minister under Hooda from 2005 to 2008. Younger son Kuldeep Bishnoi won the Hisar Lok Sabha seat twice (2004, 2009) and held the Adampur Assembly seat. Kuldeep’s wife, Renuka Bishnoi, was elected from Hansi in 2014. His son Bhavya Bishnoi won Adampur in 2022. Bhajan Lal’s nephew Dura Ram won from Fatehabad in 2019.
To be precise, Bhajan Lal won Adampur Assembly seat on nine occasions between 1968 and 2005, his wife Jasma Devi won in a byelection held in 1987, son Kuldeep Bishnoi in a byelection in 1998, and again in 1009, 2014 and 2019, Kuldeep’s wife Renuka Bishnoi in a bypoll in 2011 and the couple’s son in a bypoll held in 2022.
Bhajan Lal also won Lok Sabha elections from Faridabad in 1989, Karnal in 1998 and Hisar in 2009. Kuldeep Bishnoi also won Lok Sabha election from Bhiwani in 2004 and a bypoll for Hisar Lok Sabha seat in 2011.
By any count, no other family has won more elections in Haryana.
But in 2024, Bhavya Bishnoi lost Adampur, the family’s ancestral stronghold, held for 56 years since 1968, to Congress’s Chander Prakash by just 1,111 votes.
It was the first time since Haryana’s formation that the Bishnoi family did not hold Adampur. Chander Mohan, however, won Panchkula on a Congress ticket, providing the family a foothold.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)
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