AA Edit | BJP must face Haryana vote: A taste of its own medicine?

With three MLAs belonging to the Haryana Legislative Assembly defecting to the Congress camp, the state government led by BJP’s Nayab Singh Saini finds itself reduced to a minority. It now has 43 MLAs in an 88-seat House and is two short of an absolute majority.

It is only proper, therefore, that it takes early steps to prove its majority on the floor of the House and assert its legitimacy before proceeding with matters of governance in the state.

Ironically, there won’t be many who will beat their chests at the fact that the party that has been conducting Operation Lotus to topple elected governments in state after state is now getting a taste of its own medicine. Although it is perhaps several years since a BJP government is threatened by defections, it cannot afford to ignore the crisis altogether either, especially since its former ally, the Jannayak Janta Party with 10 MLAs, has declared that it will vote against the government in the Assembly.

Haryana is due to have an Assembly election later this year. The BJP came to power for the first time in the state in 2014, winning 47 seats in a 90-member Assembly. Until then the political stage here had been shared by the Congress and various offshoots of the party once headed by Choudhary Devi Lal.
The BJP could not muster the numbers in the elections in 2019 but managed to hold on to power with the support of the JJP, led by Dushyant Chautala, the great-grandson of Devi Lal.

Recently, the party effected a leadership change in the state. It replaced Manohar Lal Khattar who was its face since 2014 with Mr Saini.

It was part of the election management strategy of the BJP which calculated that the anti-incumbency feelings against the Khattar leadership could be neutralised by a largely unknown new face. Such a strategy has been seen to work in several other states.

It is not yet clear if the Saini government will sail through a confidence vote in the Assembly but the fact remains that the three Independents have chosen to break free from NDA. Which is headed by BJP that claims it will return to power in the Centre winning more than 400 of the Lok Sabha’s 543 seats.

Does this gesture by the Independents have more to it than meets the eye? It is a question that the BJP must ask itself seriously.

Grandstanding during election campaigns is not unusual but the Haryana development must cause the party to keep its ear to the ground. For, realpolitik can take you only so far; it’s the will of the people that actually does the job.