Following the announcement of Lok Sabha elections, the ruling and opposition parties are gearing up for the elections. Lok Sabha elections are to be scheduled in Haryana on May 25 in the sixth phase of election. The ruling BJP has declared candidates for all 10 parliamentary seats while contrary to this, the Congress remains undecided in terms of seat declaration. The Rohtak Lok Sabha seat, considered to be the bastion of Bhupendra Singh Hooda’s family in Haryana, has always been among most prominent as well as politically significant parliamentary seats witnessing a battle for supremacy and dominance between two of the politically dominating families of former Deputy Prime Minister Chaudhary Devi Lal and Bhupender SIngh Hooda multiple times. Hooda family has emerged victorious maximum times on the seat proving its mettle. Hooda’s unilateral hold and dominance on the seat can be gauged from the maximum victories marked by family members. Since the Rohtak constituency came into existence, as many as 17 Lok Sabha polls including single bypoll were held on the seat from 1952 to 2019 and out of these,Hooda family succeeded in defeating the opponents for a record nine times.
Marking consecutive victories, Bhupendra Singh Hooda’s father, Ranbir Hooda emerged victorious on this seat twice in the years 1952 and 1957. In this row, Bhupender Singh Hooda won the Lok Sabha elections held in the years 1991, 1996, 1998 and 2004 defeating Chaudary Devi Lal in 1991, 1996 and 1998 thrice. A neck to neck fight was between both of them as Bhupendra Hooda defeated Devi Lal by just 383 votes. In that election, Bhupendra Hooda got 2,54,951 votes while Devi Lal got 2,54,568 votes. After this, when was sworn in as the state Chief Minister then in 2005, he resigned from the Rohtak Lok Sabha which necessitated the bypoll on the seat and in the by-election held in 2005, his son Deependra Singh Hooda, who is currently a Rajya Sabha MP, won the election. After this, Deependra Hooda won the elections in 2009 and 2014 but could not survive the Lok Sabha battle in 2019 losing it to BJP’s Arvind Sharma by a small margin of 7503 votes in a very close battle.
The BJP high command and the state leadership are pretty aware that in wake of the prevailing political scenario, winning the Rohtak seat would not be less than an uphill task for the party candidate. Notably, Despite the Modi wave, BJP candidate Arvind Sharma was able to win the elections here by a margin of just 7503 votes in 2019 and due to this, after a lot of brainstorming, BJP has come with the decision to field sitting MP from Rohtak. It is pertinent to mention that the BJP wanted to field its former partner and JJP leader Deputy CM who held the portfolio of the Deputy Chief Minister in BJP-JJP alliance government from Rohtak Lok Sabha but he refused which resulted in the break up of both parties. How serious BJP is about the Rohtak seat can be gauged from the fact that the state level party office of the party has been set up in Rohtak itself.
The statistics of the Election Commission revealed that the Rohtak Lok Sabha constituency has a total of 1863973 voters and the constituency includes four assembly constituencies of Rohtak district – Meham, Garhi Sampla Kiloi, Rohtak and Kalanaur constituencies, four constituencies of Jhajjar district – Bahadurgarh, Badli, Jhajjar and Beri and Kosli assembly constituency of Rewari district. Last time, Deependra had to face defeat in the contest due to one-sided voting in Kosli constituency in favor of the BJP candidate.
In terms of technical aspects, the Congress party is stuck in two ways to some extent regarding the candidature of Deependra Hooda from the Rohtak seat. In fact, it is clearly mentioned in Section 69(2) of the Representation of the People Act (RPA) 1951 that if a person already holds the membership of Rajya Sabha and in case he gets elected as Lok Sabha MP, he will have to resign from the membership of Rajya Sabha.
In such a situation, if Deependra Hooda wins the Lok Sabha elections, then as soon as the certificate of Lok Sabha MP is given to him by the Returning Officer, his membership of Rajya Sabha will end from that very moment.. In such a situation, the Congress high command does not want to lose its seat. It is noteworthy that Deependra’s tenure in Rajya Sabha is till 2026. On the other hand, Deependra Hooda is firm on contesting the polls stating that he has decided to contest the elections from Rohtak and will not step back. Although various speculations are still being made, the decision on contesting elections from Rohtak has to be taken by the father-son duo. He said that he does not have any intention to fight the Lok Sabha polls when Deepender enters the fray.
The final decision on the matter will be taken by the party, he added. Earlier, Bhupender Singh Hooda said that if party leaders, Randeep Singh Surjewala, Kumari Selja or decide to fight the Lok Sabha polls “we will be happy”.
