How long does it take to go from ‘rising star’ to ‘also ran’? Less than five years, going by the experience of Dushyant Chautala, the great grandson of Devi Lal and grandson of Om Prakash Chauthala.
Chauthala was the wonderkid of the 2019 Haryana assembly elections. This US-returned 31-year-old amassed a whopping 15% vote-share and 10 out of 90 seats in the debut election for him and his newly floated Jannayak Janta Party.
However, some initial missteps, along with equally obtuse political strategies in the wake of the farmers’ protests, have combined to more or less snuff out one of Haryana’s most promising political beginnings.
Starting on the wrong foot
The problems started soon after the post-poll alliance was formed in October 2019. Not only was the alliance inconsistent with the anti-BJP stance of the Jannayak Janta Party, it also contradicted the politics represented by the two parties.
“Traditionally, BJP and the Jat-oriented parties such as JJP represented two opposing trends in Haryana politics,” said Sandeep Yadav, an activist with Haryana-based Jai Kisan Andolan.
He pointed out that for several decades, Haryana politics was under the domination of Jats – an agrarian community that makes up the single largest community in Haryana at around 26-27% of the total population.
The state got its first Jat chief minister in 1968, two years after it was formed, in the form of Congress’ Bansi Lal. From then, all the way till the tenure of Bhupinder Singh Hooda of the Congress in 2014, the chief minister’s chair was almost inevitably occupied by someone belonging to the Jat community.
“Haryana’s politics has been revolving around the Jats vs non-Jats distinction. Jats, being the most numerous, have always been dominant..and people belonging to other groups have always been told that we can’t make a CM from your community [because of the numbers],” Yadav pointed out.
BJP – in its search for an effective strategy to counter the Congress and INLD – long ago decided it was better to try to unify the non-Jat groups behind itself. This was partly made easy because of the traditional bias in BJP’s vote base towards urban and upper-caste groups.
The strategy paid off for the party in 2014 when it single-handedly won 47 out of the 90 seats in the state.
As expected, it gave Haryana its first non-Jat chief minister in 37 years in the form of Manohar Lal Khattar, who belongs to the Punjabi Khatri community – considered to be one of the ‘upper castes’.
However, the party could not reach a majority in the 2019 assembly elections, winning only 40 out of the 90 seats, while the Congress improved its tally by 16 seats to 31.
The surprise, however, was the unexpectedly strong performance of Jannayak Janata Party, then newly formed by Dushyant Chautala.
Suddenly, Dhushyant, a young man who had done his BBA from California State University, found himself the kingmaker. Given that pooling his 10 MLA’s with Congress’ 41 would still fall short of the halfway mark, Chautala did the unthinkable – he embraced the BJP, joining the government as Khattar’s deputy, and held on.
Even as his core constituency – farmers and Jats – militated against the central government in 2019 in the aftermath of changes to agricultural laws, Chautala was steadfast in his loyalty to the alliance, supporting the saffron outfit despite several of his supporters beseeching him to abandon the alliance.
Nearly five years on, he finds himself in a sorry state: His party has been unceremoniously ejected from the ruling alliance, reportedly after being refused by its partner to spare even a single seat to contest on during the upcoming Lok Sabha election.
Most pundits attribute the not-so-enviable condition of his outfit to this decision.
“In the [2019] elections, they got votes because they opposed the BJP. But after the elections, they went and sat in its lap,” says Yadav. “Whatever goodwill they had with the farming community was over when they refused to walk out during the farmers’ agitation.”
Now, JJP finds itself with neither its beloved ally – for which it alienated its voters – nor, of course, his core voters, who have apparently become disillusioned by the stand taken by the party – not just after the election, but ever since.
Noted political scientist and national coordinator of CSDS’ Lokniti program, Dr Sandeep Shastri, says that in the dog-eat-dog world of politics, it is one’s duty to look out for one’s own votebase and one cannot expect any mercy or consideration from other parties, whether allies or rivals.
In this case, he says, the BJP seems to have decided that Chautala’s party would not make much of a difference to its chances of victory.
“They seem to have realized that if they went into the election with a partner, they would need to sacrifice a few seats and given its 370 seat target, they would not want to do that,” he pointed out.
Shamsher Chandel, an independent journalist based in Chandigarh, too believes that the current plight that JJP finds itself in can be linked to doubts that its ally has in its potency.
“Probably, the BJP wants to test the waters [before the assembly elections], and see if we can go by itself in the Lok Sabha elections, and then [based on the results] chalk out a strategy for the assembly elections,” he noted.
Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
Interestingly, for BJP, the fallout from the ejection of Dushyant Chautala is limited – even if it turns out that he actually has not lost much of the 15% support he found among the electorate five years ago.
“The way the BJP sees it, even if Jats end up voting for JJP, it will help it, because it will divide the opposition [Jat] votes,” Yadav points out, adding that he would not be surprised if the whole episode is part of a well-scripted drama. “I expect JJP to contest all 10 seats and try to eat into opposition votes.”
However, the prospect of JJP acting as a ‘vote cutter’ is not worrying the opposition parties right now.
Dr Jagmati Sangwan, former Central Committee member of the CPI(M), said JJP now has “hardly any following left”.
“They seem to be facing a threat to their survival. They have ignorable potential to impact Haryana politics,” she said.
As such, she added, there’re only ‘remote chances’ of JJP being invited into the opposition alliance, an assessment shared by Dr Shastri as well.
“The INDIA alliance already has AAP and the Congress who are finding it difficult to divide the ten [Lok Sabha] seats among themselves,” he pointed out.
Moreover, some pointed out, even if JJP was to be given a seat from the opposition tally to fight on, it is highly likely that the outfit would return to the NDA once the Lok Sabha elections are over.
Bad Optics
Even as BJP follows the dharma of realpolitik in dealing with its out-of-luck ally, it remains a fact that the ‘shoddy’ treatment accorded to JJP by the BJP could dent the image of the saffron party further.
BJP has a remarkable track-record of splitting parties who try to leave its camp. It also has a reputation for slowly ‘consuming’ its alliance partners as it spreads its roots in newer and newer areas.
This fear is believed to have been what underlay the decision by AIADMK, one of the two major parties in Tamil Nadu, to break off its alliance with the BJP recently. Another such partner which entertained such misgivings is Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United).
However, the most famous of such fallouts involves its oldest ally, Maharashtra’s Shiv Sena, which was split into two after they insisted on being treated as an equal.
“Wherever the BJP has been a junior partner in an alliance, it’s only a matter of time that they have converted themselves inot the senior partner, or they have moved out of the alliance and weakened the senior partner,” Shastri points out.
“This has happened in Maharashtra, this has happened in Jammu and Kashmir, this is going to happen in Bihar and to a certain extent, this also explains what is happening in Tamil Nadu.”
Still, he does not believe that BJP stands to lose much by way of goodwill or reputation from the latest incident. BJP’s allies, he says, know what they are signing up for.
“Don’t tell me there is any special love for the BJP that brings [Chandrababu Naidu’s] TDP close to it,” he pointed out, adding that it’s an alliance dictated by the common need to defeat YSR Congress.