Assembly elections: Code of conduct comes into effect
SECURITY State govt has requisitioned 200 companies of paramilitary forces
CHANDIGARH : With the Election Commission announcing the poll schedule for the 90 assembly seats in Haryana, the model code of conduct (MCC) has come into effect in the state with immediate effect.
While polling will be held on October 21, the counting of votes of will take place on October 24.
Talking to mediapersons, Haryana chief electoral officer (CEO) Anurag Agarwal said the notification for the election will be issued on September 27 and the last date for filling nominations will be October 4.
He said the scrutiny of nomination papers will be held on October 5 and the last date for withdrawal of nominations is October 7. He said the final voter list has been published as per which 1.83 crore voters will exercise their right to franchise this time. There are 3.64 lakh voters in the age group of 18 to 19 years. The voter turnout in 2014 Vidhan Sabha election was 76.5 %.
The CEO said that 19,442 voting centres had been established in the state, including 5,511 in urban areas and 13,931 in rural areas. There are 10,288 polling locations in the state, he said.
Besides, an arrangement of 27,996 voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) machines has been made.
Agarwal said that this time the EC has adopted a tough stance against the defacement of property, hence directions have been sent to all deputy commissioners for carrying out different set of activities. The EC will activate the C-VIGIL app from Sunday onwards and anyone could upload the photographs regarding the violation of MCC on this app. Agarwal said that voter helpline 1950 is functional round the clock.
Regarding the issue of paid news, he said the district and state level media certification and monitoring committees have been constituted.
He said the income tax department has also started a toll free number 1800-180-4815 for the monitoring of election expenditure of the candidates.
The state government has also requisitioned 200 companies of
paramilitary forces for the polls.
HOW PARTIES FARED IN 2014 ELECTIONS
While the BJP had won 47 seats in 2014, there were 19 MLAS of Last date for filing nominations
the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) and 17 of the Congress. The BSP and Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) won one each seat and there were five independent MLAS.
That politics is the art of the possible is a primer that even hard-nosed hacks learn, or are taught, over and over again.
With Saturday’s announcement of the Haryana assembly election came a flashback to an instructive lesson this writer 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 the 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 a 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 until then.
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 anyone beyond the party’s three known leaders in Haryana: 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 firstever 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 -- to win 75 of 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 in the 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 as 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 adopting a homespun style of governance that was radically different from his predecessor’s as in his micromanaged schemes that addressed longstanding grievances on inequitable development, caused chiefly by discriminatory caste considerations of the 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 the legacy of a fanatically Jat-minded and scamplagued 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 helped by an online transfer policy that significantly stemmed graft-tainted postings and transfers.
CASTE FAULTLINES
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, the Jind bypoll and topped by clean sweep of the 10 Lok Sabha seats – Khattar steered clear of exploiting caste faultlines 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’S 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 standout performance as due to the Opposition’s woes. Therssparcharak-turned-politician seems on course to script an October Revolution 2.0.