Chandigarh: In 1999, a school teacher in Bhiwani kept a board in the staff room. He pasted newspaper clippings on it, one for every Haryana soldier killed in Kargil.
The teacher was Om Prakash Dhankar, then also the BJP’s general secretary in Haryana. Twenty-seven years later, the widow of one of the names on that board has been appointed Governor of Karnataka.
Sudha Yadav, 34 at the time, was the wife of BSF Deputy Commandant Sukhbir Singh Yadav, who died in the Kargil war.
A former BJP MP, her name figures in the list of six leaders released for Governors in a press communique Monday by Aneeta C. Meshram, Additional Secretary to the President of India. The other five are Om Prakash Mathur, Governor for Keralam, Rajendra Vishwanath as Governor of Tamil Nadu, Braj Mohan Ram as Governor of Odisha, Dhal Singh Bisen for Uttarakhand and Dushyant Gautam for Sikkim.
A call from Delhi
Dhankar, who later served as a Haryana minister from 2014 to 2019 and the party’s state president from 2019 to 2023, told ThePrint that the 1999 Lok Sabha polls came soon after Kargil.
Modi was then the BJP’s national general secretary (organisation) and in charge of Haryana. The party had been given five of the state’s ten seats. Om Prakash Chautala’s INLD, its ally, contested the other five.
Modi called Dhankar and said he wanted to field a Kargil war widow from one of the seats. He asked for a suitable name.
Since Dhankar was keeping a record of the martyrs on the board of his school, he had details of each one of them.
“The first to lay down his life in the Kargil war was Suresh from Charkhi in Bhiwani district. The second was BSF’s Deputy Commandant Sukhbir Singh Yadav,” Dhankar said.
Many of the dead were unmarried. Some had left behind widows aged 20 to 24. Sudha Yadav was nearly 34 and held a PhD.
“I told Modi-ji that she would be the best candidate because of her maturity and education,” said Dhankar.
On Modi’s directions, he sent Ram Avtar Lamba, an old ABVP colleague, to her house. Lamba confirmed the details, including her qualifications.
Fax, a Qualis and a different plan
Dhankar said Modi was tech-savvy even then. He had asked all party office-bearers to keep a fax machine at home.
One day a fax arrived from Modi. It asked Dhankar to meet Sudha Yadav along with the party’s vice-president Kailash Sharma.
“We went in Sharma’s Qualis and told her about the party’s proposal,” Dhankar recalled. “But she was more inclined to be given an appointment as a Haryana Civil Services (HCS) officer on compassionate grounds.”
That evening, Sharma and Dhankar sent separate reports to Modi. Sharma wrote that she was willing to join the HCS. Dhankar wrote that she would reconsider and agree to contest.
Rs 12.5 lakh in a kurta
Modi launched his campaign at a gathering of party workers in Gurugram, Dhankar said, and he did it emotionally.
He told the crowd that his mother gave him Rs 10 or Rs 20 as blessings whenever he went home. He never spent that money. Once, he had donated all of it towards a party building. Now he would give whatever he had for Sudha Yadav’s election.
He then called senior leader Rambilas Sharma to collect it. Sharma held out the end of his kurta like a jholi and Modi put his money in it. People followed and put in what they could. Within minutes, Rs 12.5 lakh had been collected.
The campaign picked up pace at a rally where a war widow came on stage and hugged Sudha Yadav. Both women wept. Newspapers, including the Times of India, carried the photograph.
Sudha Yadav, fighting from Mahendragarh, defeated Rao Inderjit Singh of the Congress by over 1.39 lakh votes. It was her first election and her first year in politics. The BJP-INLD combine won all ten seats.
After the first win
She lost the next two elections, in 2004 and 2009. By 2014, her old rival Inderjit Singh had himself joined the BJP.
She has not been given a ticket since Modi became Prime Minister. But the party kept her busy. In July 2015, she was made national in-charge of the BJP OBC Morcha. From 2019 to 2022, she was a member of the National Commission for Backward Classes.
In August 2022, she was named for the BJP’s Parliamentary Board. She was the second woman there, after Sushma Swaraj.
Subhash Barala, Rajya Sabha MP and former state BJP president, said she remains among the most respected leaders of the party in Haryana. Though she was not fielded in elections after 2014, he said, she was given several responsibilities in the organisation.
Sudha Yadav did her M.Sc. in Chemistry from IIT Roorkee in 1987 and PhD in 1992. She is a recipient of the President’s Guide award. She has two children.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
Also read: Narendra bhai turned me to politics, goal is own majority in Haryana: BJP top panel’s Sudha Yadav