Gurugram: The bitter divide within Haryana’s Chautala clan, which has played out in elections and public mud-slinging for nearly a decade, may be showing the first tentative signs of softening, driven, strangely, by a face-off with the police on a bridge in Hisar and a farmer leader’s timely warning.
At the centre of the Hisar row are Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) leaders Dushyant Chautala, former deputy chief minister of Haryana, and his brother Digvijay Chautala, the party’s youth state president.
Dushyant was embroiled in a stand-off with a Hisar Crime Investigation Agency in-charge, and an SIT is now probing the episode, while Digvijay faces FIRs in connection with an alleged rampage at Guru Jambheshwar University of Science and Technology and one on a complaint from Kurukshetra University.
While the JJP is under simultaneous legal and political pressure, it is precisely this moment of strain that appears to be nudging sections of the wider Chautala family, long splintered, to sympathise with Dushyant’s camp.
Ranjit Singh Chautala, the clan’s acknowledged patriarch and the younger son of late former CM and deputy prime minister Chaudhary Devi Lal, has already condemned the Hisar incident. So have Aditya Devi Lal and Sunaina Chautala, members of branches of the family that have had no obvious political reason to side with the Dushyant camp until now as the belong to different parties.
On Friday, Digvijay told ThePrint that he would be meeting all clan members ahead of the 27 April Chhatra Mahapanchayat in Hisar.
“Our family is one,” he said. “I will gather the (Chautala) village, go to the khaps, panchayats and farmer organisations, and seek support to deliver justice to the students.”
The outreach follows a pointed intervention by Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) leader Rakesh Tikait, who arrived at a farmers’ dharna in Jind this week and told Dushyant publicly: first go to village Chautala, take the family into confidence, and only then come to the farmers.
“If there is a fight within the family, the BJP will isolate them one by one,” Tikait warned.
He invoked his father Mahendra Singh Tikait’s relationship with Devi Lal, the dynasty’s founder, to underscore what is lost when a family fractures. “When a family splits, the government first accommodates them, then discards them,” he asserted.
Digvijay’s response to Tikait was, in effect, an acceptance.
When asked by ThePrint whether he would also call on his uncle Abhay Singh Chautala specifically, he would not give a straight answer. “Other people are also involved. We are meeting all concerned,” he said.
The hedged answer reflects where the real faultline still runs. Abhay, Devi Lal’s grandson and Om Prakash Chautala’s younger son, as well as Indian National Lok Dal’s (INLD) surviving political face, is the one family member who appears to not have softened.
Speaking to reporters Thursday, he said: “The people gave my nephews (JJP) 10 seats in 2019, and they broke the people’s trust by supporting the BJP.”
The reference was to JJP’s alliance with the BJP-led government in Haryana when Manohar Lal Khattar was CM. The alliance officially broke in March 2024, ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
Also Read: How BJP’s alliance partner JJP hurt it the most in Haryana
A look at Chautala clan
To understand what a Chautala family reunion, even a partial one, would mean, it helps to map who sits where in this sprawling dynasty.
It begins with Chaudhary Devi Lal, the patriarch who towers over everything.
Twice CM of Haryana, from 1977 to 1979 and 1987 to 1989, and deputy prime minister from 1989 to 1991, Devi Lal built a political base among Jat farmers through loan waivers and rural welfare that no successor has fully replicated.
He founded the Lok Dal, which evolved into the Indian National Lok Dal. He had four sons, Om Prakash, Ranjit Singh, Pratap Singh and Jagdish Chander, and it is through these four branches that the clan’s current map must be read.
The dominant branch has always been that of the late Om Prakash Chautala. An MLA and CM for multiple tenures in Haryana, Om Prakash was INLD’s undisputed face in 1989-90, 1990-91, 1999-2000 and from 2000-2005.
In 2013, a court conviction in the JBT teacher recruitment scam sent him to prison for 10 years and effectively decapitated the party. His elder son Ajay Singh Chautala was convicted in the same case.
Ajay had been an MLA from Dabwali in 2009, a Rajya Sabha member in 2004, a Lok Sabha member in 1999, and even won in the Rajasthan assembly in 1990 and 1993. With both father and son behind bars, INLD’s organisation began to hollow out.
Ajay’s family broke from the INLD in 2018 and floated the JJP. His elder son Dushyant, a Lok Sabha MP from Hisar from 2014 to 2019, and a young face with genuine traction among Jat youth, became JJP’s engine.
In the 2019 Haryana assembly elections, the JJP won 10 seats, enough to make it kingmaker, and Dushyant became deputy CM in alliance with the BJP. His mother Naina Singh Chautala won from Badhra on a JJP ticket that year. Dushyant’s younger brother Digvijay contested from Dabwali in 2024 but lost.
Om Prakash’s younger son Abhay Singh Chautala stayed with the INLD and became its face in the field. He won from Ellenabad four times, most memorably in a 2021 bypoll that he himself had triggered by resigning from his seat in solidarity with the farmers agitating against the now-repealed farm laws.
His son Arjun Chautala contested from Rania in 2024 and is the sitting MLA, while another son Karan Singh is emerging in party politics. But 2024 was cruel even to Abhay, he lost Ellenabad, ending a four-term run, a result that underlined how far the family’s collective footprint had shrunk.
Devi Lal’s second son Ranjit Singh carved out a quieter but durable presence.
An MLA from Rori in 1987-91, he won from Rania in 2019 as an independent and served as a minister in Haryana. He contested again in 2024 as an independent. As the senior-most active member of the first generation after Devi Lal, his opinion still carries weight, and his condemnation of the Hisar incident is being read as significant.
Devi Lal’s youngest son Jagdish’s branch enters the picture through Aditya Devi Lal, who switched from the BJP to INLD and won in 2024 from Dabwali—the same constituency the Ajay-Dushyant branch had long regarded as its own.
Aditya has also sided with Dushyant in the Hisar row.
From Devi Lal’s third son Pratap Singh’s branch comes Sunaina Chautala, wife of Pratap’s son Ravi Chautala. She contested from Fatehabad in 2024 but polled only 9,681 votes. President of INLD’s women’s wing, she too has expressed support for Dushyant in the Hisar incident.
The Hisar incident
On 17 April, Dushyant and Digvijay had gone to the Hisar SP’s office in the Guru Jambheshwar University case. On the way back, at the Sabzi Mandi bridge, Dushyant alleges that a police vehicle tried to knock him down and that CIA in-charge Pawan Kumar pointed a weapon at him.
Pawan Kumar has denied the charge, saying he had merely asked Dushyant’s driver to drive properly in traffic. The incident was caught on video.
जब रक्षक ही भक्षक बन जाए, तो व्यवस्था पर सवाल उठना तय है। pic.twitter.com/UGvYm7qEJx
— Dushyant Chautala (@Dchautala) April 17, 2026
Four complaints have been filed in the matter, two by Dushyant and his security personnel Pradeep Kumar, and two by Pawan Kumar and another policeman Raj Kumar. Dushyant’s side has named Pawan Kumar and five other policemen at the Urban Estate police station.
The CIA in-charge has complained of rough driving by the JJP escort and assault on a policeman. An SIT under DSP Kanwaljeet Singh is now investigating the case.
Six policemen, including Pawan Kumar, have recorded their statements. Notices have gone to Dushyant, Digvijay and four gunmen; none have appeared before the SIT yet.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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