Gurugram: The Haryana Congress, which came within a whisker of losing the sole Rajya Sabha seat it set its sights on, is now battling an internal storm. Its acting state president has quit the party and five MLAs are facing show-cause notices for allegedly voting against the party’s official candidate in the Rajya Sabha polls the previous day.
On Tuesday, Ram Kishan Gujjar, working president of Haryana Congress and former Chief Parliamentary Secretary in the earlier Bhupinder Singh Hooda government, submitted his resignation to party president Mallikarjun Kharge.
Gujjar’s wife, Shalley Chaudhary, is the Congress MLA from Naraingarh. During voting on 16 March, Chaudhary was seen exiting the Assembly premises alongside Tarun Bhandari, political secretary to CM Nayab Singh Saini, which set tongues wagging in Chandigarh’s political circles.
At a press conference in Chandigarh, journalists cited Shalley Chaudhary’s name, along with those of four other Congress MLAs who are suspected to have cross-voted. Hooda neither confirmed nor denied the names. When reporters pointed out that those named were conspicuously absent from the press conference while other legislators were present, Hooda said, “Jo nahi hain…”—and let the sentence hang.
Journalists finished it for him: “Jo nahin hai, sab vahi hai” (those who are absent are the ones). Hooda smiled.
Asked about Gujjar’s resignation, Hooda was blunt. The resignation, he said, should have come from the MLA herself, not her husband.
Later in Delhi, Congress MP Deepender Hooda told reporters at the AICC headquarters that the party high command had already initiated disciplinary proceedings against those who voted against the party candidate, and that their names would be made public soon.
Congress MLA from Jhajjar, and a former minister under Hooda from 2005 to 2014, Geeta Bhukkal, was more forthright in pointing out Chaudhary’s role in the Rajya Sabha polls. “She was with me during our visit to Himachal Pradesh where Congress MLAs were lodged in hotels to protect them from ‘poaching’. She was humming ‘radhey radhey’ all along. However…she did disloyalty with her party by voting for the rival,” she alleged.
The Print reached both Shalley Chaudhary and Ram Kishan Gujjar for comment. Chaudhary’s phone was switched off, while the person who answered Gujjar’s phone identified himself as his brother and confirmed the resignation, but said he was unable to comment on the reasons.
How Haryana Congress nearly threw it away
Of Haryana’s 90 MLAs, two from INLD abstained from voting. Five other votes, four from Congress and one from BJP, were declared invalid while five Congress MLAs voted for BJP-backed independent candidate Satish Nandal instead of the party’s official nominee Karamveer Boudh.
That left 83 valid votes in play. Under the single transferable vote system, the winning quota worked out to 27.67 votes.
BJP’s Sanjay Bhatia got 39 first-preference votes and crossed the threshold comfortably, with his surplus transferring to Nandal. Boudh received 28 first-preference votes. Nandal accumulated 27.33, his 16 first-preference votes plus Bhatia’s transferred surplus. The margin between Nandal and Boudh was a mere 0.67 of a vote.
Notably, four of the five Congress MLAs who are being suspected to have voted for Nandal had been part of the party’s “herding” exercise in Himachal Pradesh for three days leading up to the vote, and still managed to make contact with the BJP-backed candidate.
To add to that, the Gujjar-Chaudhary family has a personal connection with the BJP. Shalley Chaudhary’s younger daughter is married to Utkarsh Chaudhary, a nephew of Union Minister of State Krishan Pal Gurjar.
Naraingarh connection & Gujjar’s legal troubles
Naraingarh carries its own backstory. It is CM Saini’s home turf. He won the seat in 2014, defeating Ram Kishan Gujjar himself. Before that, in 2005, it was Gujjar who defeated INLD and BJP candidates to win the seat.
In 2009, Gujjar’s name had surfaced in connection with the suicide of a journalist in Naraingarh. A sessions court in March 2017 convicted and sentenced him to four years for abetting the death of journalist Pankaj Khanna. However, the Punjab and Haryana High Court in May the same year suspended the sentence handed to Gujjar.
It was this case that kept him from contesting the 2019 assembly elections, leading to his wife Shalley Chaudhary’s entry into electoral politics.
The Congress’s next move, formal notices to the five MLAs and whatever action follows, will test whether the party high command is willing to act firmly, or settle for a narrowly-averted disaster and move on.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)