Amitabh Shukla | Chandigarh
The suspense over the name of the
new Haryana Chief Minister is expected to be over by Tuesday afternoon when the
newly-elected BJP legislature party meets here to decide who would be their
leader. As the BJP went to the polls without announcing any chief ministerial
candidate, the doors are wide open with half a dozen aspirants lobbying for the
top job in the State where the party has a simple majority of 47 MLAs in the
90-member Assembly.
Manohar Lal Khattar, the
first-time MLA from Karnal and having deep roots in the RSS for four decades,
is being considered a front runner. He is believed to be close to Prime
Minister Narendra Modi, has worked in the organisation for long, and is
non-controversial and a hard taskmaster. State BJP chief Rambilas Sharma too
has strong RSS connections and is a non-Jat aspirant for the top job. Ambala
MLA Anil Vij, the face of the party in and outside the last Vidhan Sabha, is
the third aspirant from the non-Jat group. But if the party prefers someone
from the dominant Jat community, only two names are being considered Capt
Abhimanyu and party’s Kisan cell president Om Parkash Dhankar.
In Delhi ,
all these aspirants on Monday queued up at the BJP headquarters to plead their
cases before party chief Amit Shah, who was busy handling Rs hotlineRs from Maharashtra . BJP
general secretary JP Nadda was closeted with Shah while Haryana election in-charge Vijayvargiya and deputy-election-in-charge Anil Jain too were
part of the consultations process.
Sharma, who came out after his meeting
with Shah understandably did not say anything about his being the choice for
the top post, saying the name will be out on Tuesday morning. He, however,
offered ‘laddos’ to people around. Capt Abhimanyu too offered sweets but
claimed that he was not aware as to who would win the race for the CM.
Abhimanyu, a Jat, did not buy the argument that only non-Jats have voted
aggressively for the BJP. There are around half-a-dozen BJP Jat candidates who
won elections.
All the potential CM candidates
denied that there was any particular non-Jat focus in the BJP’s scheme of
things. Haryana Prabhari Jadgish Mukhi went on to say that the BJP has raised
its politics above cast identifies. Then came the turn of Rao Birender Singh to
arrive at the party office. When asked about the possibility of a non-Jat
wearing the CM’s hat, Sigh candidly said “non-Jat hi Banega”.
The BJP parliamentary Board on
Sunday deputed Union Minister and former BJP president Venkaiah Naidu as the
central observer. He will preside over the meeting of the legislature party to
get the opinion of the MLAs. Naidu will be assisted in the job by party
vice-president Dinesh Sharma and Haryana in-charge Jagdish Mukhi at UT Guest
House. Party sources said if the meeting remained inconclusive and there is no
unanimity amongst the MLAs, the decision could be left to the BJP Parliamentary
Board.
The name of the new Chief
Minister could either be announced after the MLAs meeting or later in the
evening in New Delhi by the central
leadership. The party would stake claim to form the Government on Tuesday
evening and the State could see a new Chief Minister before Diwali, top party
sources said.
As the BJP got unprecedented
support from the areas dominated by non-Jats, it is expected that the party
would prefer someone from these areas as the Chief Minister. Given that the
party was never a strong political player in the State with only four MLAs in
the last House, it hardly has any experienced face to choose from.
There is little possibility of a
Union Minister from Haryana being chosen for the Chief Minister’s post. The
reason is simple. There is no legislative council in Haryana from where they
can get elected, and secondly with 47 members in the House the party cannot
afford to ask a MLA to resign to accommodate any Union Minister. However, in
the pool of possible names, there are two Union Ministers from Haryana in Modi
Cabinet - Krishna Pal Gurjar from Faridabad
and Rao Inderjeet Singh from Gurgaon. They, however, do not fulfill the caste
equation in the new political realities of the state post the Assembly polls.
After winning the polls for the
first time on its own, BJP leaders are now talking about the agenda before the
new government. On top of their priority is freeze in the liberal policy on
Change in Land Use (CLU) which helped Robert Vadra and hundreds of small and
big builders of the state mint money in the last 10 years of Congress rule. (October 21, 2014 )
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