Gurugram: Clearly, he believes in making lemonade when life gives him lemons. And so, even with both legs fractured in a washroom fall, Haryana minister Anil Vij is singing his pain away.
On the intervening night of Sunday and Monday, the 72-year-old energy, transport and labour Minister fell in his washroom, breaking his fibula in both legs.
As he has been advised rest for three weeks, he is unlikely to manage to attend the budget session of the Haryana Assembly due to begin 20 February.
Within hours of the accident, a video surfaced in which Vij was seen sitting on a chair, with his injured legs resting on a table, singing ‘Chal ri sajni ab kya soche‘ from the 1960 Bollywood film ‘Bombay ka babu‘, and humming ‘Kajra na beh jaye rote rote‘.
“We have to live whatever life we get,” Vij told ThePrint from Ambala over the phone Tuesday. “It’s your choice—you live life crying or laughing. I prefer to live with laughter and singing.”
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The singing minister
Known as an enthusiastic and unapologetic singer, Anil Vij breaks into song often, even without the excuse of a broken leg.
In April 2023, he was spotted singing ‘Ramaiya vasta vaiyaah‘ from the Raj Kapoor starrer ‘Shree 420‘, when resting on a park bench during his morning walk. About 20 other morning walkers joined him on that occasion.
A month before that, when singer B. Parak came calling at his office, Vij serenaded him with ‘Teri mitti mein mil jawan‘.
In February last year, he was found unabashedly singing ‘Main nikla gaddi le ke‘ in his office.
The songs range across decades and moods, sometimes patriotic, sometimes romantic, always Vij.
Many a slip…
“I like singing,” the minister said simply, when asked about his choice of numbers from his sickbed. He said he was a bathroom singer, and the bathroom had given him many injuries.
In June 2020, when he was Haryana home minister, he slipped in a bathroom and fractured his hip bone.
Again in June 2025, another washroom fall fractured his toe.
Three slips. Three fractures. If there is a man in Haryana politics who knows how to take a fall—literally and otherwise—and come back singing, it is Anil Vij.
In March 2024, when the then CM Manohar Lal Khattar resigned and the BJP’s legislature party met to elect Nayab Saini as the new CM, Vij walked out of the venue in a huff. Playing down the incident, Saini said he would go to Ambala and calm him down. But that never happened and Vij remained out of the cabinet for the next seven months. However, immediately after the October 2024 elections, he was sworn in again as a minister in Saini’s cabinet.
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The SP who said ‘It is not in my power’
Just three days before his latest fall, Vij had been in Kaithal, chairing a district grievance redressal committee meeting, where he was very much in his natural element.
A complainant, Sandeep Malik of Titram village, alleged that an assistant sub-inspector named Sandeep Kumar had defrauded him of Rs 7 lakh in a land purchase deal. Hearing this, Vij ordered the immediate suspension of the accused officer.
There was a small problem, though. The ASI in question was posted in Kurukshetra, not Kaithal.
Kaithal SP Upasana Singh, an IPS officer pointed this out. “Sir, it is not in my power,” she told the minister. “The Kurukshetra SP will take that decision.”
“What do you mean you don’t have the power?” he shot back. “When I am saying suspend him… you respond like this in every matter.” He told her to write to the DGP. She said she could write, but not suspend. He reportedly told her to go out if she had no authority. At one point, he declared, with considerable drama and to appreciative applause from those gathered: “Mera order saare Haryana mein chalta hai” (my order runs across all of Haryana).
The Kaithal confrontation was not a one-off. It was not even the first time Vij had clashed with the same SP, or in the same district.
In November 2015, Vij clashed with another woman IPS officer Sangeeta Kalia during a meeting of the district grievances and public relations committee at Fatehabad.
In November 2025 a similar grievance redressal meeting in Kaithal had seen Vij get into an argument with a police officer over the latter’s failure to register a zero FIR in a fraud case. SP Upasana was present then too, and tried to explain the police version of events.
When he was given the transport portfolio in October 2024, he suspended a bus stand supervisor on his very first day in office for maintaining an unclean toilet. He has carried out surprise inspections of bus stands, power stations, hospitals and government offices across Haryana, and a suspension order is usually his opening move when he finds anything amiss.
The enduring Ambala MLA
He won the Ambala Cantonment seat for the seventh consecutive time in 2024, by 7,248 votes. He first became an MLA in 1990, after Sushma Swaraj vacated the seat for the Rajya Sabha. He has been in and out of the cabinet, fought two elections as an independent, and found his way back to the BJP.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)