As the campaign for Assembly elections in Haryana came to an end on Monday, the BJP seemed visibly certain of arriving within sniffing distance of government formation in the Congress-held State.

Without having projected a chief ministerial candidate in Haryana as well as Maharashtra, the BJP relied solely on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appeal and the momentum of the party’s victory in the Lok Sabha to carry the day in the Assembly polls as well. Polling is to be held in both States on October 15 and the results will be declared on October 19.

The Lok Sabha results this year reflect a complete reversal of the ground situation in Haryana since the Congress swept the 2009 polls with 35.08 per cent of the total votes, which had given the party 40 seats in the 90-member Assembly.

In the same year, the Congress had won nine of the 10 Lok Sabha seats in Haryana.

However, in the Lok Sabha elections this year, the Congress managed to win only one seat while the BJP scored seven of the eight seats it contested.

From 9.04 per cent in the 2009 Assembly elections, the BJP’s vote percentage went up to a staggering 34.7 per cent. The other party which retained its vote share in Haryana this time was Om Prakash Chautala-led Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), which scored 24.4 per cent of the votes cast.

Chautala’s incarceration in a scam concerning recruitment of teachers in the State when he was Chief Minister has generated widespread sympathy among the Jats, who constitute about 27 per cent of the electorate in Haryana.

Caste configuration

However, according to BJP sources, the rise in Chautala’s graph is directly proportional to the consolidation of other castes — namely Dalits, Brahmins, Banias, Yadavs and Gujjars — around the BJP. Dalits, who constitute just over 19 per cent of the electorate, are the second significant segment in Haryana’s caste configuration. The BJP had won the SC reserved constituency of Ambala in the 2014 elections and hopes to consolidate the Dalit vote further in the upcoming polls.

The BJP also figures that while the Jats may have gravitated towards Chautala, Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, despite facing heavy anti-incumbency, will manage to split his clan votes to some extent.

The Chief Minister’s son Deepender Hooda was the sole Congress winner in Haryana from Rohtak parliamentary constituency in the recently-held Lok Sabha elections.

“So even assuming that Jat vote will be significantly polled in favour of Chautala, Hooda will still be getting some of his clan members to vote for the Congress.

“The other castes will naturally gravitate towards the BJP. In fact, the over-projection of Chautala has been good for us because it forces at least the Dalits to vote en masse for the BJP,” said a BJP leader here.

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