Hisar: In the heat and dust of Haryana’s Bhatol Jatan village less than 100 km from Delhi, a small crowd is listening to Brijendra Singh, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate from Hisar constituency. A herd of buffaloes moves back and forth between Singh’s SUV and the curious bystanders, until the owner decides to remove them from the scene altogether.
From the stage nearby, you can hear Brijendra say, “I want your vote, but I don’t want to criticise anyone. Mujhe nakaratmak vote nahin chahiye (I don’t want a negative vote).”
Perhaps, he needn’t worry too much. Brijendra has spent most of his adult life as a — Haryana-cadre, what else — bureaucrat, and this plunge into politics is cushioned by the decades-long intimacy of his father, Birender Singh, with Haryana politics. While currently with the BJP, Birender spent 42 years in the Congress.
Father has been Steel Minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Cabinet since he joined the BJP in 2014. Mother (Prem Lata) is MLA from Haryana’s Uchana Kalan constituency. Both are furiously campaigning for their son.
It helps that Brijendra’s great-grandfather was Sir Chotu Ram, the great peasant leader from Haryana.
With a lineage like that, Candidate Brijendra Singh should have it easy. Helping him out is Modi himself, any BJP candidate’s biggest asset in this election. The PM’s relentless campaigning on the Balakot air strikes especially resonates in this part of Haryana, where young men clamour to join the security forces.
Playing cards or drawing water at a handpump on the outskirts of Bhatol Jatan, both men and women voters readily tell ThePrint that they “only know Modiji’s name”. “We will vote for him. We don’t know who the candidate is,” goes a common refrain.
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Clash of the dynasts
Despite his elite St Stephen’s College education, a master’s degree from King’s College, London, his IAS experience and Fab India kurta, Brijendra admits to experiencing an identity crisis.
“I would be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in politics, except I didn’t just want to be an influential politician’s son who had nowhere to go…” he told ThePrint. “I believed I needed to first prove myself.”
Still, Hisar is hardly a walkover for Brijendra. This tough, triangular contest has become a national cynosure because two key rivals — Dushyant Chautala of the Jannayak Janhit Party and Bhavya Bishnoi of the Congress — also lay claim to dynasties of their own.
Baby Bishnoi is the 26-year-old fresh-faced son of Kuldeep Bishnoi, whose reputation for joining and abandoning parties with consummate ease only matches that of his father, former Haryana chief minister Bhajan Lal.
Kuldeep was thrown out of the Congress in 2007 because he criticised then chief minister Bhupinder Hooda. He allied with the BJP in 2011 to win the Hisar Lok Sabha by-election, defeating Dushyant’s father Ajay Singh Chautala but lost the seat in 2014 to Dushyant. He quit the BJP a few months later, ahead of the assembly elections, because the BJP wasn’t giving him the seats he wanted, and went back to the Congress in 2016.
Son Bhavya is stoic about the “Aya Ram, Gaya Ram” school of politics that his grandfather Bhajan Lal fathered and his father has practised effortlessly.
“I have heard of that phrase and believe it was associated with my grandfather, but people associate different things with different people and that was not the grandfather I knew,” he told ThePrint.
Like Brijendra, Bhavya said it was “always part of the plan” to join politics.
‘Rich’ legacies
Certainly, when Haryana was being carved up for ticket distribution for this Lok Sabha election, apart from caste, the financial and political muscle of the Bishnois, the Chautalas, the Hoodas (father and son Bhupinder and Deepender are fighting as Congress candidates from Sonepat and Rohtak, respectively) and the Birendra Singh family was a big factor.
“Each of these families is worth crores. And since elections these days have become so expensive, with each assembly constituency costing a minimum of Rs 1 crore (and there are eight-nine in each Lok Sabha constituency), the field automatically narrows down to those with the capacity to spend,” a political analyst said on the condition of anonymity.
Veteran political scientist Baldev Sihag explained the special place for dynasty and male heirs that has reached commanding heights in Haryana, over and above anywhere else in the country.
“The state became a lever for organised corruption, especially when the Congress party was in power, while the waywardness of some Jat leaders consolidated the hold of a few families,” he told ThePrint.
“This also allowed the BJP’s ‘kamal’ to flower,” Sihag added.
So, Adampur MLA Kuldeep, who inherited the constituency from his father, decided that one son should be introduced to politics, while the other, Chaitanya, was thrown into the hurly-burly of cricket (he sits on the Chennai Super Kings IPL bench). Daughter Sia, studying at the Parsons School of Design, New York, didn’t count.
At the family home in Sector 15, Hisar, the Audi seems to be a popular car. Supporters lounge on the large lawns at 8 am, waiting for Father and Son Bishnoi to emerge. When they do, Father is mobbed. It’s clear that the baton of power hasn’t passed yet, and this may take some time to happen.
The son seems good-natured enough. He was headboy at The Shri Ram School in Delhi, and went on to study abroad at Oxford and London School of Economics. But Hisar waited, so young Bishnoi returned home — to, naturally, help bring about change.
“Lunch with the Bishnois” was one way of encouraging people to reconnect with the family.
Growing up, Bhavya told ThePrint, he wanted to be a cricketer, but realised that even a good cricketer could only make a marginal difference to the country. “But if I got into politics and became good at that, I could make a difference to the world,” he added.
Both Brijendra and Bhavya insisted that their campaigns “cut across caste” — more likely, their fathers are taking care of this ubiquitous aspect of politics.
Certainly, Brijendra faces a division of the Jat vote with Dushyant, while the Bishnoi campaign hopes the non-Jat vote (backwards, Punjabis, etc) accumulates in favour of him, like it did with his grandfather.
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A family feud
In Uchana ‘halka (area)’, where Brijendra’s mother Prem Lata is MLA, sitting Hisar MP Dushyant campaigns confidently.
At Chandpur village, older women, their faces covered for protection from the hot noon sun, come out and bless him.
Dushyant got himself a public school education too, at The Lawrence School in Sanawar, Himachal Pradesh, and went on to take admission in California State Institute for a management degree.
But the family’s political legacy, once headed by great-grandfather Devi Lal, India’s former deputy prime minister, was at stake, so he returned to take charge.
In the hot loo sweeping the countryside, the Chautala family feud looks like a mini-version of the epic battle once fought in Kurukshetra next door.
Dushyant’s grandfather Om Prakash Chautala, former Haryana chief minister and leader of the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), allegedly favoured his younger son Abhay — whose son Arjun is contesting from Kurukshetra constituency — but it was senior Chautala’s elder son Ajay, who went to jail with the satrap over the 2013 junior teacher recruitment scam.
Grandfather Chautala continued to stand in favour of Abhay. So, Dushyant and brother Digvijay broke away from the INLD in December 2018 and created the JJP.
Digvijay was fielded to fight the Jind by-election in January 2019 — he came a close second to the BJP’s Krishan Lal Middha, trouncing the Congress and INLD candidates.
Now it seems Dushyant’s mother Naina Chautala is insistent that her sons, and not those of her brother-in-law Abhay, must be the rightful heirs.
The stakes for Hisar — and Sonepat, where Digvijay is fighting Bhupinder Hooda — couldn’t be higher for the Chautala family.
At Shamdo village, with cattle nuzzling in the shade of a banyan tree on the banks of a picturesque pond — a closer look reveals human faeces and mounds of uncleared plastic garbage that the cattle chew unmindfully — men emerge from their homes to enthusiastically offer Dushyant the support of the “36 biradari”, the clans and castes that make up the state’s social fabric.
In the 2017 winter session of Parliament, then INLD MP Dushyant created a stir when he rode a tractor into its hallowed grounds, protesting against a Modi government-suggested change in the Motor Vehicles Act that, he said, would have exacerbated farmer’s woes. He says he got the rules withdrawn.
“I have never taken a challenge for granted. In 2014, when I won, it seems my rival was a self-declared chief ministerial candidate,” Dushyant told ThePrint, referring to Kuldeep. “But I receive votes because I have been the face of my constituency for five years. I see everyone asking for votes in Modi’s name and not their own because they have done no work.”
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