THE BATTLE WITHIN

THE CONGRESS LEADERSHIP FEARS THAT AGGRESSIVELY BACKING HOODA COULD LEAD TO COUNTER-POLARISATION AMONG OTHER COMMUNITIES

- Anilesh S. Mahajan

In March 2005, after almost weeklong tense parleys, the victorious Congress crowned a 57-year-old Bhupinder Singh Hooda as Haryana chief minister, overlooking the claim of three-time former CM Bhajan Lal, who was by then 74 years old. By far the party’s tallest leader, Bhajan Lal had the loyalty of most of the 67 Congress legislators who were elected to the 90-member assembly. Hooda on the other hand had won his spurs in the 1990s, defeating the Chautala patriarch Devi Lal in three back-to-back parliamentary polls in the Jat heartland of Rohtak; above all, he had whole-heartedly backed the then Congress chief Sonia Gandhi in the party’s internal tussle. With the Gandhis putting their weight behind the ‘young’ Jat leader, the newly elected MLAs, too, decided to ditch the old veteran Bhajan Lal.

Two decades later, as Haryana readies for yet another state election on October 5, Hooda finds himself at a similar—if not the same—crossroads. At 76, he is ageing, and his younger bête noire Kumari Selja, the 61-year-old Sirsa MP, has better access to the Gandhis. Just a few years ago, Hooda was part of the ‘G-23’, a group of Congress MPs who had demanded large-scale reforms in the party—perceived to be a rebellion against the Gandhi family’s dominance. Though he was given a free hand since 2022 to run the party’s Haryana unit, there’s a feeling, say insiders, that his loyalties are “no longer unimpeachable”. But the former two-term CM did deliver, as the Congress wrested five of the 10 Lok Sabha seats from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the recent general election. A big factor was the mobilisation of the Jat vote behind him. Still, the party has refrained from anointing Hooda—the leader of the Opposition since 2019— as its chief ministerial candidate.