Gurugram: “As of today”, there is no alliance between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Jannayak Janata Party (JJP) for the 2024 Haryana assembly election and Lok Sabha polls, according to state BJP president Om Prakash Dhankar.
In an interview to ThePrint at his Gurugram residence Wednesday, he added that things, however, may change if the top leaders of the two parties decide later to contest together.
The BJP and JJP had entered into an alliance in Haryana after the 2019 state polls. Talking about the partnership, Dhankar said: “It was an alliance of compulsion because the results of the 2019 polls didn’t give the BJP a clear majority.”
“The party won 40 of 90 assembly seats, and we had to take the help of the JJP, which had won 10 seats, to form a government. The alliance was for five years, and it has been working well,” he added.
When asked about the JJP’s ‘Mission Dushyant 2024’, which the party launched at a rally Sunday, Dhankar said “the JJP is an independent party like the BJP and is free to have its own targets and strategies for next year’s polls”.
Under Mission Dushyant 2024, the JJP aims to increase its vote share in Haryana from 17 per cent (in 2019) to 51 per cent in the 2024 state polls, and its number of MLAs from 10 to 46 by projecting party leader Dushyant Chautala as the CM face.
Dhankar further conceded that many BJP leaders, including former Union minister Chaudhary Birender Singh and former state minister Captain Abhimanyu, were in favour of snapping ties with the JJP, but added that a final call would be taken by the party’s central leadership only.
“Dushyant Chautala won the Uchana seat to enter the Haryana assembly in 2019. Birender Singh and his family had won the seat six times. Hence, his concern is understandable. Similarly, Captain Abhimanyu became MLA in 2014 from Narnaund. Now, that seat too is with the JJP,” Dhankar pointed out.
On the JJP’s call for simultaneous Lok Sabha and Haryana polls next year, Dhankar told ThePrint that, as state president of the BJP, he was ready for the two polls to be held together, but asserted that “a final call on this issue will be taken by the top leaders of the BJP”.
‘BJP is poll-ready’
Saying that the BJP would win all 10 Haryana Lok Sabha seats in the 2024 polls, just like it did in 2019, Dhankar said the party had gained more popularity among the public in the past five years “because of work done at the micro- and macro-level”.
“When the BJP came to power (at the Centre) in 2014, we won the elections on the Modi wave. Our party’s organisation was relatively smaller at that time. It was up to the mandal level. Today, we have shakti kendras below the mandal, then we have tridevs under shakti kendras and panna pramukhs under tridevs,” said Dhankar.
The mandal is a unit of the BJP equivalent to an administrative block in a district, while the shakti kendra is a secondary unit comprising 5 to 10 polling booths. Tridevs are three persons managing a polling booth, and a panna pramukh is in-charge of one leaf (printed both ways) of the voters’ list.
Dhankar said “our party is poll-ready in Haryana”.
“There are 90 assembly constituencies in the state, and we have 3,500 panna pramukhs and 600 tridevs per constituency in place. Up to 2.25 lakh people are registered as verified BJP workers on our portal. Within the next two months, this number will be nearly 5 lakh, of which 4.5 lakh will be verified organic members,” he said.
Dhankar dismissed suggestions that farmers in Haryana and some other states were unhappy with the BJP government, and said it was rather a case of “some so-called farmer leaders” not being happy with the BJP.
“These so-called leaders contested assembly polls in Punjab and 10 of their leaders together got less than 10,000 votes,” he added.
According to Dhankar, the “Modi government implemented the Swaminathan Commission report and started the process of calculating minimum support price (MSP) on A2+FL basis”.
A2 includes all paid-out costs directly incurred by a farmer in cash and kind on seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, hired labour, leased-in land, fuel, irrigation, etc, while FL is the imputed value of unpaid family labour.
The Swaminathan Commission has recommended calculation of MSP on C2+50 per cent formula (including the input cost of capital and rent on the land to give farmers 50 per cent returns). MSP calculated on C2 formula is higher than the one calculated on A2+FL basis.
The report was submitted in 2006, when the Congress-led UPA was in power at the Centre, and its implementation has been one of the key demands of farmers in India.
“The Congress government continued to sit on the report for more than eight years,” alleged Dhankar.
The BJP leader also referred to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to the US and his warm welcome at the White House, saying that “people have seen those times when leaders of India used to be frisked and were told to take off their shoes”.
He added that “people noticed a nation’s head touching the feet of PM Modi”, referring to Papua New Guinea PM James Marape’s special welcome for Modi during his visit to the Pacific Island nation in May this year.
“Another country head (Australian PM Anthony Albanese) addressed Modi as ‘boss’. During Modi’s regime, we have seen India surpassing the economy of Britain, a country that was once an empire on which the sun never set,” he added.
Recounting his visit to the residence of General Dalbir Singh Suhag (Retired) along with BJP chief J.P. Nadda last month, Dhankar said the former Army chief told them that he was “very lucky to have worked with PM Modi, because it was for the first time that the Indian Army crossed borders in Burma (Myanmar) to demolish terrorist camps, and again crossed borders in Uri (Jammu & Kashmir) to strike against terrorists across the Line of Control”.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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