Khattar’s record may hold key to Mission 75
That politics is all about possibilities is a primer that even hardnosed hacks learn, or are taught, over and over again.
With Saturday’s announcement on the Haryana assembly election came a flashback on an instructive lesson one learnt exactly five years ago in the unpredictable Jatland.
Sometime in September 2014, four months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ascent to power, a Chandigarh Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader dropped in at HT office in Mohali for an off-the-cuff lowdown on the assembly elections in Haryana.
Accompanying him was a stranger – a modest-looking middle-aged man, in crumpled kurtapyjama, who introduced himself as an pracharak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The latter came across as remarkably upbeat about the BJP’s electoral chances despite it being a fringe player in state politics so far. As if to stretch his incredulous argument further, his next query was on the BJP’s potential chief ministerial faces. In response, this writer couldn’t name beyond the party’s three known leaders: Anil Vij, Ram Bilas Sharma and Captain Abhimanyu. “Don’t count me out!” he said, with a twinkle in his eyes. Weeks later, the BJP sprang a big surprise, chalking up its first-ever victory in Haryana since it was carved out of Punjab in 1966. But, a bigger surprise was the elevation as chief minister of the RSS man who had left me with a parting teaser: Manohar Lal Khattar.
ROOKIE TO LYNCHPIN
Cut to 2019. From a rookie chief minister to the lynchpin of the party’s re-election sweepstakes, Khattar has come a long way.
If the party was catapulted to power in 2014 by the Modi momentum, it is now counting more on the 65-year-old leader’s persona and performance than on the domino effect of its stellar Lok Sabha victory to accomplish its Mission 75 on the 90 seats up for grabs.
As Haryana’s first non-Jat chief minister since 1996 – the last was Bhajan Lal, a Bishnoi – Khattar has turned the long-entrenched caste calculus on its head. Also, he is now decidedly on pole position in what is set to be a direct contest between the BJP and Congress. That’s why Khattar, not given to hyperbole, came across so sanguine about the challenge ahead. “There is, for the first time, pro-incumbency groundswell in Haryana,” he told this writer last month. “The momentum is on the BJP’s side.”
How did Khattar, so bereft of experience in administration and political management, cultivate a formidable profile? The answer lies as much in his chartering a homespun style of governance that was radically different from his predecessor as in his micromanaged schemes that addressed the long-seated grievances on inequitable development, caused chiefly by discriminatory caste considerations of previous regimes. “Khattar didn’t go by the playbook of his predecessors,” says Pramod Kumar, a Chandigarh-based political analyst. “He made a break from the long-entrenched political culture by assiduously cultivating his credentials as an honest and no-nonsense administrator.”
If Bansi Lal was known to be autocratic, Om Prakash Chautala left behind a legacy of a Jatminded and scam-plagued ruler. Khattar’s predecessor Bhupinder Singh Hooda, despite a reasonably impressive record of governance in his 10-year rule, blighted his report card with a raft of controversial land deals that later landed him in legal soup. A low key Khattar, in contrast, portrayed himself as a stickler for the rule of law, an image bolstered by scandal-free government recruitment and further helped by an online transfer policy that significantly stemmed graft-tainted postings and transfers.
HE DIDN’T EXPLOIT CASTE FAULT LINES
Even while consolidating the non-Jat, urban votebank – roughly 60% of the electorate that forms the bedrock of the party’s political surge as reflected in its serial victories in mayoral contests, Jind bypoll topped by clean sweep on the 10 Lok Sabha seats – Khattar steered clear of exploiting caste fault lines that were cleaved open by the violent Jat quota agitation in 2016.
Rather, he cultivated and co-opted the Jats, denting the support base of both the Congress and the Chautala clan. Nothing underlines this more tellingly than the flight of several Jat faces from both parties to the BJP fold.
Resisting the temptation of populist waivers and freebies, Khattar’s hands-on governance, aided by a set of bright bureaucrats in the CM’s office, focused on last-mile delivery of state and central schemes, while drafting all MLAs in drawing up constituency-specific priorities. That deepened the saffron base and also fortified Khattar’s grip on administration and the party, which had looked wobbly during his slipshod handling of law and order blow-ups. Not surprisingly, the BJP is harping on Khattar’s track record of clean governance as its main electoral trump card, shrewdly juxtaposing it with the Modi-spun nationalist narrative freshly fired up by the abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir.
In election time, desertions are often a sign of which way the wind is blowing. On that count, the BJP is the first choice. Clearly, the BJP looks unassailable as much due to Khattar’s stand-out performance as due to the Opposition’s woes. The RSS parcharakturned-politician seems on course to script the October Revolution 2.0.