Gurugram: Haryana Congress Thursday suspended five of its MLAs for cross-voting that almost cost the party candidate Karamveer Boudh a seat in the 16 March Rajya Sabha election.
The suspended legislators are Shalley Chaudhary (Naraingarh), Renu Bala (Sadhaura), Mohammad Ilyas (Punhana), Mohammad Israil (Hathin), and Jarnail Singh (Ratia, Fatehabad). The party believes that the five voted in favour of BJP-backed Independent Satish Nandal.
Haryana Congress president Rao Narender Singh told ThePrint the disciplinary committee under former MP Dharampal Malik had reviewed the MLAs’ replies to show-cause notices sent last month and recommended suspension of all five.
The Haryana Pradesh Congress Committee forwarded the report to the All India Congress Committee (AICC). Once Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge gave his approval, the HPCC suspended all five from the party’s primary membership with immediate effect.
In a statement issued by the HPCC office in Chandigarh, Rao Narender Singh said the party had taken the violation of organisational discipline seriously and that indiscipline would not be tolerated at any level. He said the decision was a clear message to all leaders and workers that any activity against the party’s collective decisions and official position would invite strict action.
Three of the five suspended MLAs—Shalley Chaudhary, Renu Bala and Jarnail Singh—had submitted written replies to their show-cause notices, each denying the allegations. Mohammad Ilyas and Mohammad Israil did not respond.
A win by 0.67 of a vote
The 16 March election should have been a formality.
Of the two Rajya Sabha seats up for grabs, Congress’s Boudh barely managed to secure one by a margin of 0.67 of a vote.
In the 90-member Haryana assembly, the ruling BJP holds 48 seats and the Opposition Congress has 37.
Under the single transferable vote system–in which MLAs have to give a ranked preference (1,2,3,4…) for candidates, the winning quota worked out to 27.67.
Of the 88 votes polled, five Congress MLAs marked BJP-backed Nandal as their first preference and four other Congress ballots were declared invalid, leaving Boudh with 28 votes. In addition, BJP candidate Sanjay Bhatia won one of the seats comfortably, and his surplus votes transferred to Nandal.
Had another Congress MLA defected, Boudh’s tally would have dropped to 27, allowing Nandal to overtake him using Bhatia’s surplus votes.
The morning after the election, Haryana Congress’s state executive president Ram Kishan Gujjar—Shalley Chaudhary’s husband—resigned from the party, submitting his letter directly to Kharge. His resignation was accepted.
The party then spent two days not naming any MLAs for cross-voting.
As speculation made the rounds, Sirsa MLA Gokul Setia put the Congress leadership on notice in a video, demanding the party should name the five MLAs by the next morning or find him sitting in protest at the party office gates.
He was there on 18 March, joined by two others.
The Leader of Opposition and former Congress chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda arrived soon after, met the legislators, and took them to his residence.
Within hours, Haryana Congress in charge B.K. Hariprasad named four MLAs, whom the party believed had cross-voted, at a press conference in Delhi. The fifth—Jarnail Singh—was named two days later.
The three MLAs who replied to their show-cause notices denied the charges and said they had shown their ballots to Hooda, who was authorised by the Congress to verify votes during polling.
Shalley Chaudhary asserted she had voted for the official party candidate and accused senior leaders of targeting her. She also took a swipe at the party’s past, alluding to what she described as similar conduct in the 2016 Rajya Sabha polls.
Renu Bala likewise rejected the allegations, saying she had been loyal and was being wrongly implicated.
Jarnail Singh, in his written reply, also denied having cross-voted.
The five suspended MLAs
The most striking name on the list is Jarnail Singh (Ratia, Fatehabad), who is counted among Hooda’s loyalists and was one of the 31 Congress MLAs the party had shifted to Himachal Pradesh ahead of 16 March voting—a precaution against poaching. Jarnail Singh went through the exercise, returned, and allegedly voted the other way.
Shalley Chaudhary followed her husband into politics.
Gujjar had won Naraingarh in 2005, defeating then-BJP candidate and now-chief minister Nayab Singh Saini, only to lose the same seat to Saini in 2014.
A sessions court conviction in a journalist’s suicide case in 2017—later stayed by the Punjab and Haryana High Court—kept Gujjar from contesting in the 2019 assembly polls, bringing Shalley into electoral politics.
Her younger daughter is married to a nephew of Union Minister of State Krishan Pal Gurjar.
On polling day, Shalley was purportedly seen leaving the Vidhan Sabha premises alongside Tarun Bhandari, political secretary to Chief Minister Saini—a detail that raised eyebrows in Chandigarh.
Mohammad Ilyas (Punhana) is a seasoned politician—a five-time MLA elected in 1991, 2000, 2009, 2019 and 2024, with stints in INLD before settling in the Congress.
Mohammad Israil (Hathin) is a political inheritor: his father Jaleb Khan served as a legislator and Chief Parliamentary Secretary in the Hooda government.
(Edited by Prerna Madan)
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