With Assembly and Lok Sabha elections to be held in Haryana next year, all the political parties are brainstorming every possible strategy to assess the political mileage. In this series, the ruling BJP has come with a major change in the organization setup on 27 October replacing OP Dhankar with newly appointed state president Naib Saini who is an MP from the Kurukshetra parliamentary seat and is in the good books of CM Manohar Lal Installation of Naib Saini on the chair of state president ahead of polls is being viewed from different point of views. However, senior leaders of the party believe that changes have been made by the party at the organizational level in many states and the changes in Haryana should also not be seen from any other perspective. Political experts are of the opinion that the caste equation emerges as a crucial factor behind this as the party is trying to woo voters from the OBC category by appointing Naib Saini who hails from the same community.
It is a noticeable fact that the party has undoubtedly played the OBC card by appointing Naib Saini. Political experts believe that removing Dhankhar from the post may prove detrimental for the BJP as it may not circulate the right message among the Jat community, to which Dhankhar belongs. In continuation to this, it is worth stating that Jat bigwigs of the saffron BJP faced a debacle in assembly polls in 2019. Apart from Cabinet Ministers OP Dhankhar and Captain Abhimanyu, Subhash Barala and Prem Lata, wife of former Union Minister Birendra Singh, failed to survive the assembly battle. For some time now, the BJP and Jat communities have been at loggerheads on many issues. In such a situation, Dhankhar’s removal from the post may upset the people of the community and in wake of this, the BJP will have to take advance measures.
The statistics revealed that out of the total 2.83 crore people in Haryana, the number of people from BC (A) and BC (B) category families is 4793312 and 3797306 constituting 16.93 per cent and 13.41 per cent respectively. On the other hand, the number of BC (A) and BC (B) category families is 4793312 and 3797306 respectively. In the wake of this, the appointment of Naib Saini is being considered to woo the OBC community.
There are 90 assembly seats in Haryana and Jats are believed to have immense influence on almost 50 percent of the seats. In the 2014 assembly elections, Jats cast their maximum votes to BJP more than expected and due to this the party unilaterally formed the government on its own. However, the resentment of Jats towards the BJP increased in the 2019 elections which forced the BJP to take crutches of JJP, an entrant in politics, to form the government. Technically speaking, the Jat vote bank is divided among all the parties. Jat vote bank is more inclined towards Congress, followed by JJP, INLD and BJP. In such a situation, considering the voting trend of Jat voters, the BJP has played the OBC card by appointing Naib Saini as the state president.
Notably, the Jats constitute the highest number of vote banks in the state and it is estimated that the number of Jat voters in Haryana is more than one-fourth. Be it any political party in the state, all used to focus more on Jat voters. In the recent past, the BJP has certainly succeeded in gaining a sizable chunk of the Jat vote bank towards itself, but the resentment of the Jat community against the BJP on many issues continues to surface. It is estimated that BJP also succeeds in gaining 15 to 20 per cent of the total Jat votes in every election.
Jat stalwarts are in all the parties in Haryana. At present, Congress veteran Bhupendra Singh Hooda is considered to have the most influence among the Jat voters. JJP leader and Deputy CM Dushyant Chautala also belongs to the Jat community. Apart from this, INLD Abhay Singh Chautala also hails from the community while the list of Jat Bigwigs in BJP includes Chaudhary Birendra Singh, Subhash Barala, Captain Abhimanyu and OP Dhankhar along with several other leaders.