Pankaj Gupta, a managing partner of Paisa Worth, a medium-sized enterprise in Haryana’s Panipat city, is a worried man. The festival season—October to January, spanning Dussehra, Diwali, Christmas and New Year—is usually the busiest time of the year for him. These four months account for eighty percent of Paisa Worth’s annual sales. The company sells bed sheets, carpets and doormats, and has clocked sales of around twenty crore rupees during previous festival seasons. Not this year. As he peered over sales orders on his laptop, Gupta told me that business was down “by 60 percent and we will be lucky if we can sell five crore rupees worth of goods.” This year, the company had to lay-off nearly eighty percent of its employees, and Gupta was doubtful whether the firm could afford to pay the annual Diwali bonus to the remaining 70 workers. “Business is down, my revenue is down and my blood pressure is up,” Gupta said, as he lit a cigarette and took a deep drag in his air-conditioned office.
On the other side of the city, Shyam Singh Malik echoed Gupta’s concerns. Malik runs a medium-sized enterprise that manufactures textile-weaving machinery. His business infrastructure includes two manufacturing units, two spare-parts trading units and a foundry. Malik told me that his business was down by seventy percent, primarily because “demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax” have had a crippling effect. “There is no liquidity in the market because of GST and we are finding it hard to raise capital,” he said.
Twenty kilometres from Panipat, in the town of Samalkha, Kuldeep Arya had a similar tale. Arya is a manufacturer of nuts and bolts, and has been in the business since 1994. He said that this year, his business was facing the worst downturn he had ever seen. Arya told me that before the GST, “my company’s credit limit at the bank was Rs 30 lakh,” but he had been forced to raise it to Rs 1.1 crore because there was a liquidity crunch in the market. He, too, blamed the GST—his firm’s monthly turnover is around Rs 50 lakh and he has to deposit Rs 9 lakh as GST by the twentieth of each month. “It’s the same with every company. The liquidity is being deposited with the government and there is nothing in the market.” Arya has to pay a GST rate of 18 percent, significantly higher than the five percent value-added tax that he used to pay.
Panipat is a major textile hub. According to a report by the union ministry of micro, small and medium enterprises, in the financial year 2015-16, Panipat’s textile industry employed 33,993 workers in a total of 2,369 units. However, the slowdown in the Indian economy, triggered by the economic policies of the Bharatiya Janata Party at the centre, has had a debilitating effect on Panipat’s textile industry and consequently, its workers.
Akash Batla, the director of a placement agency in Panipat, told me that there was an unemployment crisis in the textile industry—jobs in the sector have dried up in the last one year. “Earlier, we used to get ten to 12 resumes every month and we were able to find jobs for them. But ever since the recession has started, we have been getting 20–25 applications and we are unable to find jobs anywhere,” he said. Statistics provided by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, a business-intelligence firm, confirm Batla’s assertion. Between May and August 2019, the unemployment rate in Haryana was the second highest in the country, at 21.38 percent. In the 20 to 24 age group, it stood at a staggering 65.55 percent.
Despite the economic uncertainty, the ruling BJP state-government is confident that it will retain power in the upcoming assembly elections on 21 October. Mahipal Dhandha, the incumbent member of Haryana’s legislative assembly from Panipat Rural, told me that a mix of local and national issues would ensure his re-election. I asked him if the economic downturn would harm his party’s political prospects. “Is it a crime to integrate the nation?” he responded, deflecting from the question by referring to the abrogation of Kashmir’s special status granted under Article 370 of the Constitution. He said what was more important was that the “people of India have suffered for the last 70 years and are happy now with Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.” According to him, “Abolishing Article 370 touched the soul of the people here and they will reward the BJP in the elections.”
A majority of the people I spoke to in Panipat and its surrounding areas echoed Dhandha and said that it is likely that the BJP will be voted back to power. Economic distress had taken a backseat because “the BJP are masters of marketing,” Gupta told me. “They have successfully tagged the Congress as a Muslim party and themselves as the champions of Hindus.” Malik was of the opinion that “the number one issue that people will vote for the BJP is Article 370.” He said that “before this, it was a loss for India, but now Kashmir is fully ours.” Gupta was also supportive of the government’s decision to effectively nullify Article 370.
Another factor contributing to the expectation of a BJP victory is the general perception that there is no competent opposition. Gupta told me that the BJP’s “social media messaging has drilled into the public’s head that Rahul Gandhi is a pappu”—a simpleton. “Is there even a viable alternative?” he asked me. The Congress seems to be the main opposition party in Haryana. The Indian National Lok Dal, the erstwhile regional powerhouse led by Om Prakash Chautala has imploded. Chautala, the party patriarch, is in jail on corruption charges, and his sons and grandsons are in the midst of a bitter family-feud over political control of the INLD. But the Congress seems unable to leverage either the INLD’s waning influence or the BJP’s economic failings, as it is battling a leadership struggle, internal rifts and rebel candidates.
On 5 October, Ashok Tanwar, a former Congress state-unit president, resigned from the primary membership of the party. Tanwar, who hails from the Dalit community and rose up through the Congress’s ranks, was removed as the state chief in September, allegedly at the behest of the influential Jat leader and former chief minister Bhupinder Hooda. Hooda is now the party’s primary face in the campaign. He and Tanwar have openly sparred for control of the party and Tanwar wields considerable influence in and around Sirsa, which might damage the Congress’s prospects there.
A close aide of Hooda, who requested anonymity, said that the former chief minister had assured the party high-command that the Congress would win 32 of the state’s 90 seats, but internally, the Hooda camp was expecting the number to be between 15 to 20 seats. He reiterated Dhandha’s view that “economic issues and livelihood” were irrelevant, and that “this is an election that is being fought along caste lines and nationalism and this is where the BJP will score.” He, too, brought up Article 370. “Ghulam Nabi Azad is the Haryana in-charge and being a Kashmiri Muslim he has vehemently opposed the de-operationalisation of Article 370,” the aide told me. This, he believed, was going to be a problem for the party because “in Haryana, the average person is in favour of it.” Hooda, on his part, has swung from lambasting the party’s criticism of the move to read down Article 370—before he was given charge of the election campaign—to dismissing it as a poll plank once his leadership was secure.
Rebel candidates are another threat to the Congress. Chaudhury Nirmal Singh, a four-time Congress MLA, and his daughter, Chitra Sarwara, are classic examples. Both are contesting as independents against the official Congress candidates—from Ambala City and Ambala Cantonment respectively—despite the perception that they belong to the Hooda faction. When I asked the aide why Hooda was willing to damage his own party’s prospects, he said, “Congress is not fighting this election to win, but to re-establish Hooda’s supremacy in the Haryana Congress.”
The aide also said that the BJP had positioned itself as a non-Jat party—the present chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar is Punjabi—and every section, barring Jats, will vote for the BJP. “Plus, corruption in the last five years of the Khattar regime has not been as much as during Om Prakash Chautala’s time,” he said. “All this will go in favour of the BJP.”
Moreover, Hooda’s grasp on the Jat community is not as iron clad. I travelled to Sivan, a Jat-majority village on the outskirts of Panipat. At the sarpanch’s house, a group of Jat men were smoking a hookah and discussing politics. I overheard a conversation about the number of Hindu and Muslim voters in the Panipat Rural constituency. Most of them were farmers and everyone agreed that farming was not remunerative because the price they received for their crops was falling, while the input costs were rising. Everyone was supportive of the government action in Kashmir. Jaydeep Kadian, one of the men in the gathering, told me, “Nearly every Jat family in this village has men in the armed forces and we are all happy that Kashmir is finally integrated into India.” He added, “A section of Jats is not happy with the BJP because they made Khattar, a Punjabi, the CM”—chief minister.
Yashpal Kadian, another resident of Sivan, was extremely supportive of the BJP and said, “Khattar has done good work and the BJP should be given one more chance.” He claimed that there was a BJP wave and dismissed criticism of the GST. “Modi took a courageous step by implementing the GST,” Kadian said.
The topic of Article 370 cropped up at another gathering of men from the Jat and Brahmin community at the panchayat office. The Jat community seemed to be split on the BJP’s electoral prospects. While some claimed that the BJP would not get more than 30 seats, others were convinced that the ruling party will prevail. “Gundagardi”—thuggery— “in Kashmir will end now,” one man said, while another added, “Muslims used to breed uncontrollably, but outlawing triple talaq has taken care of that.”
“The BJP has detached the economy from politics somewhat,” Yogendra Yadav, a political activist whose party, Swaraj India, is contesting 28 seats, told me. “The economy is pretty much in a crisis right now, but the BJP has managed to convince people not to vote on the economy, but on national emotion. They have also managed to establish that there is no one against Mr Modi, he is the only man who can solve the nation’s problems,” he added. “The Congress has been absent in the state, the INLD has imploded and that has created a political vacuum.” According to Yadav, “The point is not that voters are very fond of what the BJP has done, but when they look for alternatives they find nothing.”