Gurugram: Senior Jat leader and ex-union minister Chaudhary Birender Singh has chosen Gandhi Jayanti, celebrated on 2 October, for a rally he plans to hold in Haryana’s Jind district. Titled ‘Meri Awaz Suno’ (Listen to my voice), the rally, according to the leader, is aimed at helping the voice of the public reach the ruling dispensation.
Ahead of the rally, the 77-year-old Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member held two more public meetings Sunday — one at Kurukshetra and the second at Yamunanagar. Additionally, his wife, former MLA and BJP leader Prem Lata, addressed four more meetings in her former constituency, Uchana Kalan, the same day, while their son, Hisar MP Brijendra Singh, addressed six in Bawani Khera. The Bawani Khera assembly seat is part of BJP leader Brijendra’s parliamentary constituency.
The timing of the meetings is significant, according to political observers, as they come amid uncertainty surrounding the candidature of Singh’s wife and son for next year’s general and assembly elections.
Birendra Singh, however, maintains that the exercise is simply an attempt to dispel “confusion and disillusionment” among his supporters.
“I have been in politics for the past 50 years now, and I have people across the state who have always stood with me. I just want to give them a message through Meri Awaz Suno that if they are active and strong, political parties will automatically listen to their voice,” he told ThePrint.
He also quoted Prime Minister Narendra Modi as saying last year that India has eradicated extreme poverty from the country.
The former minister’s claim on the rally is not endorsed by political analysts ThePrint spoke to, who see Sunday’s meetings and the upcoming rally as attempts at displaying his clout in a crowded political space, aimed at putting pressure on the BJP leadership to drop its ally Jannayak Janata Party (JJP) — led by deputy chief minister and current Uchana MLA Dushyant Chautala — before next year’s assembly and Lok Sabha polls.
While Birender Singh wants the Hisar and Uchana Kalan Parliament and assembly seats for his son and wife in next year’s Lok Sabha and assembly elections, JJP too is eyeing both.
According to political analyst and author Arjun Singh Kadian, Birender Singh “is targeting Dushyant Chautala and his JJP”.
“It’s a show of strength, but he is likely to tread carefully,” Kadian, who has authored two books — Land of the Gods: The Story of Haryana” and Neeraj Chopra: From Panipat to Podium, told ThePrint, adding that the Jat leader could also be trying to project himself as CM face or strengthen his son’s political base.
The BJP, meanwhile, downplayed the rally, with the party’s state spokesperson Sanjay Sharma telling ThePrint that there was nothing wrong with political leaders holding public meetings “so long as they toed the party line and did not say anything against the party or its leadership”.
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‘Tragedy king’ of Haryana politics
Talking to ThePrint, Birender Singh, who switched to the BJP in 2014, said there were many issues he wanted to help address through his rally. Among these were the issue of farmers, he claimed.
“If we take the example of Haryana in particular, the landholdings of farmers are dwindling fast. Left with no options, youths are running abroad. In the process, many of them are getting duped. All this requires a new solution to the problem,” Singh, the grandson of pre-independence farmer leader and activist Sir Chhotu Ram, claimed.
He added: “I will tell them that one gets nothing by running away. Improvement comes with positivity”.
A law graduate from Panjab University, Chandigarh, Birender Singh fought, and won, his first assembly election from Uchana Kalan in 1977 as a Congress candidate, bucking the strong wave of discontent against his former party after the Emergency. He has since won the election four more times — 1982, 1991, 1996, and 2005 — and has been a minister in Haryana’s Bhajanlal and Bhupinder Hooda governments.
He has also been a three-time MP, having won the 1984 parliamentary election from Hisar and then becoming a Rajya Sabha member twice — first in 2010 and then in 2016.
In 2014, a year after he joined the BJP, he was made minister in the then newly-elected Narendra Modi government — first becoming minister of rural development, panchayati raj, sanitation & drinking water and later as the Union minister of steel.
His near-brushes with political opportunities has earned him the sobriquet ‘Tragedy King’ of Haryana politics. For instance, in 1991, he reportedly nearly became chief minister of Haryana, having been purportedly promised the position by former prime minister and then head of Congress, Rajiv Gandhi. But Gandhi’s assassination turned the tide against him, making Bhajanlal the chief minister.
His second “missed chance” was in 2013, when, as Congress leader, he reportedly nearly became a cabinet minister under then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, but was eventually dropped, reportedly on rival Bhupinder Hooda’s insistence.
Claims in Hisar, Uchana Kalan — why the rally
According to political analysts, the 2 October rally is a show of strength to help his family secure BJP tickets to two of the most coveted seats in Haryana — Hisar Lok Sabha seat and Uchana Kalan assembly segment.
In 2019, Birender Singh’s son Brijendra Singh, a 1998-batch IAS officer of the Haryana cadre, took voluntary retirement from civil services to fight and win that year’s parliamentary election from Hisar. In doing so, he beat two scions from politically connected families — Dushyant Chautala, whose JJP was then only months old, and former Adampur MLA Kuldeep Bishnoi’s son Bhavya Bishnoi.
Since then, however, political equations have changed — while JJP is now an ally of the BJP, Bishnoi, formerly a Congress leader, has now joined the Khattar-led party.
Significantly, Bishnoi, who’s known to wield a powerful clout, has reportedly already announced his desire to contest next year’s general election from Hisar, while Dushyant Chautala has announced his party would contest from all 10 parliamentary seats, including Hisar and Bhiwani, both “family” seats.
It isn’t just the Hisar Lok Sabha seat that could cause heartburn to Birender Singh. The Jat leader could also have trouble in Uchana Kalan — a seat he wants for his wife Prem Lata.
It’s also a seat that ally JJP wants: Om Prakash Chautala, the patriarch of the then undivided Indian National Lok Dal — the party from which JJP broke away in 2018 — first won the seat in 2009.
But Prem Lata had beaten Dushyant Chautala, Om Prakash’s grandson, here to become a legislator for the first time in 2014, although she lost the seat in 2019.
The BJP has already indicated that the seat would go to the Birender Singh family — at a public meeting in June, the BJP’s Haryana in-charge Biplab Kumar Deb had announced that Prem Lata will be the “next MLA from Uchana Kalan”. But with the JJP still part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, uncertainty over whether the promise could be fulfilled continues to loom large.
Also Read: ‘Aiming for 40% vote share in Haryana,’ says Dushyant Chautala, hints at JJP’s foray into Rajasthan
‘Political showdown’
The 2 October rally is to “galvanise his demoralised supporters” to remain “with the system,” Birender Singh told ThePrint.
“At present, they are disillusioned and confused with the system. They feel that they are remembered when they are needed, but in return, they are not given any recognition,” he told ThePrint.
When asked to elaborate, he said: “Isn’t it ironic that the fundamental issues people faced at the time of independence of the country like poverty, unemployment, the plight of farmers, and their dependence on shahukars (grain market traders) for high-interest loans still plague people?”
Talking on whether he was worried about his wife Prem Lata and son Brijendra Singh getting BJP tickets, he said that was “the BJP’s prerogative”, but added that his rally was “much beyond the family’s political interests”.
“Having spent half a century in politics, I want to create a team of at least 30 people from different parts of Haryana who have a different attitude towards people than a majority of the current lot of politicians have,” the former union minister said. “If I can turn them into such a lot, any political party will love to adopt them.”
Was he worried that the BJP’s continued alliance with the JJP could harm his family interests? Singh chose to sidestep the question, saying instead that he had always been “against the alliance”.
“Jiske paas apne liye vote nahi hai woh BJP ko kya vote dilayega (How will someone who has no votes help the BJP get votes),” he said. “When his party (Dushyant Chautala’s party JJP) contested its first assembly poll in 2019, its only poll plank was to defeat BJP. After the alliance with the BJP, the JJP lost that. What will the party now say to the people of Haryana while seeking votes in the 2024 assembly polls?”
He, however, conceded that for his family, it was a direct political fight with the JJP.
“We have always told the party’s senior leaders that if we’re weak then they can tell us frankly. But if the party thinks we are powerful politically, then where is the need to have an alliance with Dushyant Chautala’s JJP?” he asked.
According to political analyst Yoginder Gupta, it wasn’t uncommon for political leaders in Haryana to show off their clout before elections. What Birendra Singh was doing was no different, he said.
“We may see many more leaders cutting across the political spectrum holding such rallies in the coming months,” Gupta told ThePrint.
But political analyst Kadian, quoted earlier, said BJP’s alliance with the JJP has complicated matters for not only Birendra Singh’s family but also the Chautalas.
“Uchana Kalan is famous for a clash between the Chautala family and Birender Singh’s family. It’s for this reason that it has stayed politically volatile. But now, the Hisar parliamentary seat has become like that too. It’s interesting to see what’s unfolding now,” he said. “The 2024 elections now have become another showdown between the two families.”
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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