Gurugram: The Congress has denied a ticket to Hisar MP Brijendra Singh, who quit the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to join the Congress last month. He is the son of former Union minister Birender Singh, a known detractor of former chief minister Bhupinder Hooda, who returned to the Congress earlier this month after a decade in the BJP.
In its list of eight candidates for Haryana declared late Thursday, the Congress fielded Jai Prakash, a three-term MP and Hooda loyalist, from Hisar. Brijendra won the seat in 2019 on a BJP ticket, after resigning from the Indian Administrative Services.
Similarly, Hooda’s son Deepender, a Rajya Sabha MP, has been fielded from the Rohtak seat, which he lost to the BJP by a narrow margin of a little more than 7,000 votes in 2019.
The Congress also declared the candidature of Kumari Selja, a known Hooda detractor, from Sirsa. Haryana Youth Congress president Divyanshu Budhiraja, a Deepender loyalist, will take on former chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar in Karnal. Other candidates declared Thursday include Mahendra Pratap Singh from Faridabad, Rao Dan Singh from Bhiwani-Mahendragarh, Varun Choudhary from Ambala, and Satpal Brahmachari from Sonipat.
The party is yet to declare its candidate from Gurugram. Party sources told ThePrint that actor-politician Raj Babbar is among those seeking a ticket from Gurugram.
Meanwhile, Kurukshetra — that went to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) as part of its seat-sharing with the Congress — will see a contest between former AAP Rajya Sabha MP Sushil Gupta and industrialist Naveen Jindal, contesting on a BJP ticket. Gupta is president of Haryana AAP.
“It is very disappointing for us. The Congress has ignored the claims of a person who came leaving a bhari thaali (full platter) behind in the BJP. Even before he joined the Congress, senior leadership of the party had given assurance though I am not aware of all the details. But still, the party chose to ignore our leader,” said Vijay Kaushik, a senior state Congress functionary who is considered close to Birender Singh’s family.
Kaushik alleged that Brijendra was denied a ticket at the instance of Hooda who it is believed calls the shots in Haryana Congress nowadays. “It is unfortunate that the Congress high command is very weak at this time. In such a scenario, local leaders run the party at their will. This is what is happening in Haryana at present,” said Kaushik.
He, however, added that ups and downs are part of politics.
Another Congress leader considered close to Birender Singh’s family claimed that if the party found itself in the running for seats in Haryana today, Brijendra Singh’s resignation from the BJP was the event that changed the perception that the state would be a walkover for the BJP, which won all 10 Lok Sabha seats in Haryana in 2019.
ThePrint reached Birender and Brijendra Singh for comment via calls but had not received a response by the time of publication. This report will be updated if and when a response is received.
Besides Brijendra Singh, Shruti Choudhry’s was another prominent name missing from the Congress’s list of candidates. The granddaughter of former Haryana chief minister Bansi Lal and daughter of former state minister the late Surender Singh and Congress leader Kiran Choudhry, Shruti won her first election from Bhiwani — a seat her late father won twice — in 2009. However, she was unable to retain the seat in 2014 or win it back in 2019.
Asked to comment, Kiran Choudhry told ThePrint that though it is the party’s decision not to field her daughter from the seat, she believes Shruti would have won this time.
One of her supporters, however, said on condition of anonymity that the ticket was given to Rao Dan Singh at Hooda’s instance.
Bhupinder Singh Hooda, on the other hand, maintained that the list was finalised by the party high command.
He told The Print that he was by and large satisfied by the candidates fielded by the party. Confronted with the allegation that the list of candidates bore his stamp and a few like Brijendra Singh and Shruti Choudhry were excluded from the list at his instance, Hooda maintained that it is “not my list but the Congress party’s list”.
Father, son’s turn to Congress
Brijendra Singh had resigned from the BJP to join the Congress on 10 March, at a time when several leaders from other parties were making a beeline for the BJP. After he joined the Congress, he met former party presidents Sonia and Rahul Gandhi at their residence.
Denial of a ticket to his son has once again brought focus on Birender Singh, also known in Haryana’s political circles by the sobriquet of “Tragedy King” owing to his unfulfilled ambition to become chief minister. Birender Singh had quit the Congress he was associated with since his father’s time and joined the BJP in 2014. He was then made a Union minister.
However, when he sought a ticket for son Brijendra from Hisar in 2019, he was made to resign from the Rajya Sabha. Brijendra won the seat by defeating Dushyant Chautala of the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) and Bhavya Bishnoi, who was then with the Congress, but in the assembly polls in October 2019, Brijendra’s mother Prem Lata lost to Chautala in the family bastion Uchana Kalan.
Brijendra, said party sources, began feeling sidelined in the BJP after Dushyant joined the Manohar Lal Khattar government in 2019 as deputy chief minister. This was also evident by his repeated opposition to the BJP’s alliance with the JJP in Haryana.
On 2 October last year, Birender Singh had organised “Meri Awaz Suno” (listen to what I have to say) rally at Jind, giving the BJP an ultimatum to snap ties with the JJP.
However, son Brijendra quit the BJP to join the Congress just two days before the BJP and the JJP declared the end of their alliance.
Birender Singh — the CM that never was
Birender Singh successfully contested his first assembly election from Uchana Kalan in 1977 as a Congress candidate, bucking the strong wave of discontent against the party following the Emergency. He has since won this seat four times — 1982, 1991, 1996, and 2005 — and has been a minister in the Bhajan Lal and Bhupinder Hooda governments.
Son of Neki Ram, a politician in undivided Punjab, and maternal grandson of Jat leader the late Chhotu Ram, Birender Singh was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1984 from Hisar and later served as a member of the Rajya Sabha from 2010 till 2020.
In 1991, he was reportedly promised the position of chief minister by former prime minister and then Congress president, Rajiv Gandhi. But Gandhi’s assassination in May that year turned the tide against him, and Bhajan Lal was made chief minister of Haryana.
His second ‘missed’ shot at the top post came in 2013, when, as a Congressman, he was reportedly being considered for a berth in PM Manmohan Singh’s Cabinet, but was eventually dropped, it is believed, at the insistence of Bhupinder Singh Hooda.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
Also Read: ‘SRK’ vs Hooda — Congress factions get to work as candidates list delayed in Haryana