The elections to the fifteenth Haryana Vidhan Sabha, held on 5 October, provided the first opportunity to see if the Bharatiya Janata Party is indeed losing its grip over parts of the Hindi heartland, as indicated by the general election earlier this year. The BJP came to power, for the first time in the state’s history, in 2014, a few months after Narendra Modi was first elected prime minister. Having been re-elected, five years later—albeit in a coalition with the Jananayak Janata Party—the state government, led by Manohar Lal Khattar, came under fire due to two decisions of the national party: the three controversial farm laws and the refusal to prosecute the party’s Uttar Pradesh MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh after he was accused, while president of the Wrestling Federation of India, of widespread sexual misconduct.
As a primarily agrarian state that regularly contributes the bulk of India’s wrestling contingent at the Olympics, and neighbours Delhi, Haryana was ground zero for both agitations that ensued. In an attempt to ward off anti-incumbency with a new face, the BJP replaced its chief minister of nine years, Manohar Lal Khattar, in March, with Nayab Singh Saini, the first member of the state’s Backward Classes to hold the post since Rao Birender Singh, an Ahir, ruled for eight months in 1967.
A resurgent Congress, which won five of Haryana’s ten Lok Sabha seats this year after drawing a blank in 2019, sought to capitalise on a political realignment in the state that had resulted in the dominant Jat community consolidating its support behind the party. Bhupinder Singh Hooda, who was chief minister from 2005 to 2014, has strengthened his family’s grip over the party and appears poised to secure a third term if Saini is unable to hold on to Khattar’s non-Jat social coalition and if the decline of the Indian National Lok Dal and its offshoot, the JJP, is as terminal as recent trends have indicated. Even the entry of the Aam Aadmi Party—which runs governments in neighbouring Punjab and Delhi, and whose candidates won 15 zila parishad seats in the 2022 panchayat elections—does not seem to have made much impact in a highly polarised contest.
Election History