Gurugram: In a last-day twist to the Rajya Sabha bypolls in Haryana, Satish Nandal, a state vice president of the BJP, walked into the office of the returning officer Thursday and filed his nomination papers as an Independent candidate. He was accompanied by three Independent MLAs: Savitri Jindal, Devender Kadyan and Rajesh Joon.
Nandal, a Rohtak-based businessman and former INLD leader who switched to the BJP ahead of the 2019 assembly elections, is best known for his unsuccessful but spirited fight against former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda in the Garhi Sampla-Kiloi constituency in the polls that year.
Speaking to mediapersons outside the returning officer’s office, Nandal said he was contesting as an independent and would seek support from BJP, Congress and INLD MLAs to win.
Sources in the BJP told The Print that the party had summoned Nandal to Chandigarh earlier in the day, asking him to drop everything and report immediately. He met CM Nayab Singh Saini at the latter’s residence before heading to file the nomination. What was discussed at that meeting remains unclear. What is clear is that Nandal proceeded to file his nomination as an Independent.
Ashok Chhabra, media coordinator in the Haryana government, said every individual has the right to contest as an Independent. “Only because Nandal is state vice president of the BJP doesn’t mean that the party has fielded him. The party will take a call when he seeks support. The BJP can well support him to defeat the Congress candidate.”
With three candidates now in the fray, BJP’s Sanjay Bhatia, Congress’s Karamveer Bauddh, and now Nandal, the Haryana Rajya Sabha election is headed to a contest on March 16.
Strength in numbers
The 90-member Haryana assembly currently has the BJP with 48 MLAs, Congress with 37, INLD with 2, and three Independents.
For its official candidate Sanjay Bhatia’s victory, the BJP needs 31 votes. With 48 MLAs, the ruling party has 17 votes to spare. If those 17 votes, combined with the three Independents and the two INLD MLAs, go to Nandal, that gives him 22 votes. He would still need eight more from Congress’s 37 MLAs to be elected to the Upper House.
In that scenario, Congress would be left with 29 votes, less than the Independent candidate, thereby conceding the seat to Nandal. The arithmetic is tight, but it is not impossible, and that is precisely what is making party managers in the Congress nervous.
Bharat Bhushan Batra, a senior Congress MLA, however, told The Print that not a single party MLA will vote against the party’s official candidate.
Echoes of 2016 and 2022
Haryana has a rich and distinctly inglorious history of Rajya Sabha elections ending in scandal, cross-voting and the unexpected, commonly referred to as “khela” (game) by the BJP to get its own nominees elected to Rajya Sabha seats claimed by the Opposition.
In June 2016, BJP-backed Independent and media baron Subhash Chandra won the second Rajya Sabha seat from Haryana despite Congress and INLD having backed Supreme Court advocate R.K. Anand, despite the two parties having 34 MLAs together, 15 of the Congress and 19 of the INLD.
The reason: 12 Congress MLAs’ votes were declared invalid because they used unauthorised pens—pens other than the violet one provided by the returning officer—to mark their ballots.
The episode, which came to be known as the ‘inkgate’ scandal, resulted in an FIR being registered against the Assembly’s then-secretary, R.K. Nandal, who had served as returning officer, amid allegations of deliberate sabotage.
Chandra won with 29 votes against Anand’s 21, with 12 being declared invalid.
Six years later, in June 2022, history repeated itself. Congress candidate Ajay Maken lost to BJP-backed Independent Kartikeya Sharma, son of former Congress leader Venod Sharma, by less than a single vote in one of the closest and most controversial Rajya Sabha contests Haryana has seen.
Sharma got 29.6 votes to Maken’s 29, after Congress MLA Kuldeep Bishnoi’s vote was rejected and another MLA abstained.
Bishnoi, who voted openly against the party line, subsequently joined the BJP.
In Rajya Sabha elections, each MLA’s vote carries a value of 100 points rather than a simple 1, allowing the system to transfer leftover votes from a winning candidate to the next preference on the ballot without losing mathematical precision. In 2022, with 88 valid votes in play, the winning threshold worked out to 2,934 points—29.34 in calculable terms.
BJP’s Krishan Lal Panwar crossed that mark comfortably on first-preference votes alone, and his surplus was automatically transferred to the second-preference candidate on those ballots: Kartikeya Sharma. That transfer pushed Sharma’s total to 2,960 points, or 29.6.
Maken stayed at 2,900. The single rejected Congress vote—worth 100 points—was the difference. Had it been counted, Maken would have finished at 3,000 points and won. Since it was not counted, he lost by what the system recorded as 0.6 of a vote.
This is the backdrop against which Nandal’s entry must be read.
Nandal has made clear that he is not contesting against the BJP, rather with its implicit blessing. The ruling party, with 17 surplus votes after ensuring Bhatia’s victory, can channel those extra votes toward Nandal without any public declaration of support. If eight Congress MLAs cross-vote or their votes are somehow invalidated, Nandal wins—and Bauddh loses.
BJP benefits either way. If Nandal wins, the ruling party has effectively denied Congress its seat without being seen as doing so directly. If the gambit fails and Bauddh wins, BJP wouldn’t lose face.
When a senior Haryana Congress leader was asked whether BJP’s support to Nandal could upset their arithmetic, he said the party’s MLAs would abide by the high command’s direction. Whether that confidence holds when ballot papers are actually in hand on 16 March is a different question.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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