New Delhi: Accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of treating him and his father, Chaudhary Birender Singh — who had quit the Congress to join the BJP in 2014 — as “outsiders”, Hisar MP Brijendra Singh has said the BJP does not “adopt you”.
An IAS officer-turned-politician who was elected to the Lok Sabha from Hisar in 2019, Brijendra Singh quit the BJP to join the Congress Sunday.
In an interview with ThePrint, he said that he had been feeling uncomfortable within the BJP due to several issues, including the farmers’ agitation for a legal guarantee of the minimum support price (MSP), the Agnipath military recruitment scheme and the central government’s handling of the women wrestlers’ protest.
“The BJP has a very structured, cadre-based system. My father, who joined in 2014, and I, who joined in 2019, are still considered outsiders in the party. It’s not as if they (BJP) adopt you in that sense in which you expect. So there were three to four things,” Singh said.
He said that he has no “personal issues” with anyone in the BJP “whether it’s the top leadership or my colleagues in Parliament”.
“It’s just that the kind of education that I’ve had, the kind of cultural and social setting of which I’m a part, in which education had a great role to play… and so the ideas and not strictly ideology, but the ideals which I have, which I held dear — we were just kind of not very comfortable. So the compatibility issues were there, which I felt right in the beginning,” he added.
A 1998-batch IAS officer of the Haryana cadre, Brijendra Singh took voluntary retirement to contest the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from Hisar. He went on to defeat the Jannayak Janta Party’s (JJP) Dushyant Chautala and Bhavya Bishnoi, who was then with the Congress.
Emphasising the fact that he was “born and brought up” within the Congress culture, Singh decided to join the party finally.
The Hisar MP also praised Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and his Bharat Jodo Yatra.
“Rahul Gandhi and I studied at St. Stephen’s College, we were classmates. So I never was under the illusion that he is what people portray him to be. I have always found Rahul Gandhi to be a well-read and sensitive person,” he said.
Singh said the Bharat Jodo Yatra changed Rahul as a person.
“My first trigger (when I almost jumped the ship) so to say, was during the last Bharat Jodo Yatra. Because I really felt that was a defining moment for him (Rahul Gandhi) as a person, for him as a political person and for the Congress party’s revival. It is something that people perhaps will fairly assess sometime later, maybe not right now. And so that’s when he finally came across as someone who was serious,” he added.
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‘Not given opportunity to raise farm laws issue’
After Singh was elected from Hisar, father Birender Singh — who was a Union minister during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first term from 2014 to 2019 — resigned from the Rajya Sabha in January 2020.
Many had then said that this was in line with the BJP’s “one family, one post” policy.
Brijendra Singh said that while in Parliament he got many opportunities to speak on several “critical” issues as he was also a part of the Parliamentary standing committees, especially the Public Accounts Committee, and the Committee of Defence. However, he was not given the opportunity to raise several issues, including the farm laws, in Parliament, he said.
The Hisar MP said, while he did not interact with PM Modi during his stint in the BJP, “what one has seen of him, he is a hard worker.”
“There is no doubt about it, I mean, and I’m sure every prime minister of India, if you are at the helm of affairs of a country of this size and this diversity, you have to be hard working. You can’t be relaxed and just wish everything would go fine. So, yes, he is very hard-working,” he said.
He added that the PM’s mind is “constantly ticking”. “It’s not as if his mind rests in that sense. He’s always looking at things, thinking of solutions and wants to get work done.”
The Hisar MP also said that the BJP-JJP alliance in Haryana was another serious friction point.
In October, Birender Singh issued an ultimatum that he would quit the BJP if it continued its alliance with the JJP in Haryana.
In 2019, Brijendra Singh defeated Chautala and Bishnoi. However, with the JJP being an alliance partner of the BJP and Bishnoi and his father Kuldeep Bishnoi also being a part of the BJP, Birender Singh was unsure of his son getting a Lok Sabha ticket.
(Edited by Richa Mishra)
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