Gurugram: In the municipal committee elections held in Nohar on 14 September, the Bharatiya Janata Party won just two of the 40 wards. The Congress won 20. The rest, 18 seats, went to Independents.
By any arithmetic, the chairperson’s post should have gone to the Congress. It did not.
When the house met on Monday for ward members to vote and elect the chairperson, the result came down to 20 votes each. Sumit Chachan stood for the Congress. Hajan Khatoon Tak stood as the BJP’s nominee, though her own journey to that ballot had nothing to do with a BJP ticket.
She had contested and won her ward as an Independent. The party picked her up afterwards, made her its face for the top post, and somehow found the votes to match the Congress seat in a house where it held only two seats of its own.
That gap, from two wards to twenty votes, is the real story sitting underneath Monday’s result, and it says more about a week of quiet bargaining after the ward election than about the election itself.
With the house deadlocked, the rules left no room for further voting. The tie was to be broken by lottery. A young girl was called into the room to draw it. She pulled out a single folded slip. It carried Hajan Khatoon Tak’s name, and with that, the 62-year-old was declared chairperson of Nohar Municipal Committee.
Hajan Khatoon is not new to politics and offices, even if her route to it this time was unusual. Her late husband, Manzoor Ali Tak, was himself chairperson of the same municipal committee. She is also the mother-in-law of Mehrunnisa Tak, a former minister of state in the Rajasthan government.
Monday’s vote did not happen without a political drama. A day earlier, on Sunday, police arrived at the homes of three men associated with the Congress and pasted notices at their doors. The three were Balvir Suthar, former chairman of the Krishi Upaj Mandi Samiti, Mukesh Joshi, husband of ward 9 Congress councillor Kusum Joshi, and Kuldeep Mirasi, who works as Suthar’s driver.
None of the three was home when police called. Officers spoke to family members at each house and asked that they be informed the moment the men could be reached.
Police tied the notices to a land fraud case registered at Nohar police station nearly two months ago, saying the three had not been cooperating with the investigation and that the notices were meant only to press that cooperation.
The police described the action routine, unrelated to the chairperson election due the next day.
Both Suthar and Joshi are counted among the close aides of Congress MLA Amit Chachan, and it is that proximity, more than the case itself, that has kept the timing under discussion in Nohar through the week.
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)
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