Chapter 11

THE FLUCTUATING FORTUNES OF HARYANA

It was not surprising that in the background of what Bansi Lal told me about his helplessness in administering the state because of his coalition compulsions, differences started cropping up between him and the BJP. His main grouse was that the RSS cadres were not as virtuous as they were being projected. The RSS (the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, a pro-Hindu organization) is considered the ‘mentor’ of the BJP. At times, the RSS rank and file could become jingoistic, leading to apprehensions among the minority communities.

After our overnight stay at the Karnal Circuit House, we left in the morning to attend an official function. Bansi Lal deftly avoided taking the BJP minister from the Karnal constituency in his car. Before the minister (who wanted to accompany him for the function) could enter the car, Bansi Lal invited me to sit with him on the back seat. A sheepish minister had to follow in his own car.

On our way to the Karnal Cooperative Sugar Factory’s dividend distribution function, as he was explaining the obstacles that he was facing in governing Haryana, Bansi Lal said something was happening to his eyes. Suddenly his head dropped to one side, with his half-opened eyes giving a stony look. He vomited twice and was perspiring. Holding his shoulder and head, I lent him support. I immediately asked the security officer and the driver to rush to the nearest hospital. But after a short while, Bansi Lal recovered from his drowsy state and wanted to be taken to the sugar factory’s rest house instead of the hospital. A doctor was sent for. He diagnosed the illness as travel sickness. After changing his clothes, Bansi Lal reached the function venue a bit behind schedule. Normally, politicians do not want their ill-health to be publicly known. Bansi Lal, however, told the audience the reason for his coming late.

***

Haryana politics took another turn in the latter half of 1999. The widening differences between the ruling partners led to a split in the HVP—BJP alliance. Chautala’s shrewd political manoeuvring coupled with the split in the alliance helped him topple Bansi Lal. Backed by the BJP and HVP dissidents, Chautala assumed chief ministership for the fourth time on 24 July 1999. The BJP had done another U-turn in Haryana politics. In 1996, it had declined to join hands with Om Prakash Chautala’s Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), preferring a tie-up with Bansi Lal. After the death of its popular leader in Haryana, Dr Mangal Sein, in early December 1990, the BJP had been rendered rudderless with none of its other leaders able to command state-wide influence.

***

It is not rare to find families of politicians having friendly ties and belonging to states, which are otherwise constantly involved in disputes, going out of the way to promote each other’s economic interests. It is also not rare that such promotion often leads to controversies.

One such case that triggered political controversy in the late 1980s and 1990s was the allotment of land in Haryana by the Devi Lal Government to a hotel known as Orbit Resorts, of which Sukhbir Singh Badal was the managing director and his father Parkash Singh Badal (a former chief minister of Punjab) and his wife, Surinder Kaur Badal (now deceased), were promoter directors.

On 21 March 2002, Bansi Lal told me that ‘in response to the request made by the Badals in October 1988 to the state government, the corporation allotted a 71,000-square-metre plot on the new bypass road connecting Delhi with Gurgaon in September 1989 during Devi Lal’s second tenure as chief minister [17 July 1987 to 2 December 1989]’.

As the Badals failed to set up the project within the stipulated period of three years, the plot was resumed by the Haryana State Industrial Development Corporation (HSIDC) on 2 January 1995. Bhajan Lal was then chief minister. The Badals filed a writ petition in the Punjab and Haryana High Court at Chandigarh against the resumption order. This petition was dismissed by the high court in February 1996 (when Bhajan Lal was still in power). After that, the Badals filed a letters patent appeal (LPA), which was admitted by the division bench (of the same high court) in March 1996. After a series of hearings, in January 1999, the high court quashed the resumption order.

The HSIDC and the Haryana State Government soon challenged the high court order by filing special leave petitions (SLPs) in the Supreme Court.

Controversy over the issue arose when leaders of the BJP, which was an alliance partner of the Bansi Lal-led Haryana Vikas Party Government (11 May 1996 to 23 July 1999), tried to pressurize Bansi Lal to help the Badals in the case after the HSIDC and the state government approached the apex court.

Continuing with his narration, Bansi Lal added that, in 1996, while the LPAs were pending before the the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Madan Lal Khurana, Delhi’s BJP chief minister, asked him (Bansi Lal) to accompany him to meet Atal Behari Vajpayee in Delhi. According to Bansi Lal, Khurana pointed out to him: ‘Vajpayee [who was then not prime minister] wants that Bansi Lal and Parkash Singh Badal [belonging to the Akali Dal] should meet to work together to improve the relations as both are BJP’s allies.’ Bansi Lal then told me: ‘I told Khurana that I was prepared to come for the meeting [with Vajpayee] but would not discuss the Badals’ Gurgaon land case which was before the Supreme Court. Khurana agreed.’

Bansi Lal went on: ‘At the meeting at Vajpayee’s residence where Khurana and Badal were also present, Khurana asked Badal to talk to me about his Gurgaon land case. I told him I will not be able to do anything in the matter as the case was before the Supreme Court. Then Khurana said I should ask the Government/HSIDC lawyers to remain quiet when the Badal company’s lawyers argued the case. I told him since I have not yet studied the details of the case, I will first have to see the file. After some time, the BJP called a meeting of its chief ministers in Jaipur [the capital of Rajasthan]. Being a BJP ally, I was also invited. At the meeting Bhairon Singh Shekhawat [then chief minister of Rajasthan, who became vice-president of India in August 2002] took me aside and asked me to help Badal in his Gurgaon land case. I told him how [could] I harm Haryana’s interests as the land given to the Badals [was] valued at Rs 250 crore at that time, whereas Devi Lal gave it for Rs 4 crore only? Shekhawat did not then pursue the case.’

Bansi Lal concluded: ‘The Chautala Government changed its advocate two days before the date of the hearing of the case. However, though non-implementation of the project over the plot in question was the subject matter of SLPs, an undertaking was given on behalf of Orbit Resorts during the proceedings before the Supreme Court on 3 December 1999, the date of the hearing of the case, that payment of the outstanding dues would be made within a period of six months and the construction would be completed within two years. The offer was not contested on behalf of the state government and the SLPs were disposed of by the Supreme Court. The Chautala-led Haryana Government readily did what I had refused to do. This was more like a collusive act on the bidding of Chief Minister Chautala to serve the vested interests of his family friend Badal. The BJP, which was a ruling partner in Punjab’s Parkash Singh Badal-led alliance government, also helped the Badals by joining hands with Chautala to topple my government.’

The issue of land allotment to Orbit Resorts, which had also been raked up by Captain Amarinder Singh (of the Congress) during his campaigning for 2002 Punjab Assembly elections later invited adverse comments from the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) in a report tabled in the Haryana Assembly. (Amarinder Singh became chief minister of Punjab in February 2002, after the Congress won the Assembly elections.)

The CAG report noted: ‘The company [HSIDC] has not only favoured to the extent of Rs 80.94 lakh in the allotment of land for the [Badals’] holiday and health resort, but [has] also violated the guidelines contained in the industrial policy of the state …. The allotment of land was also not in conformity with the objectives of the HSIDC. When the CAG’s staff made [sic] queries on the subject in July 2001, the HSIDC management said that the plot was allotted as per the directions of the state government’.

***

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, on 24 July 1999, the Bansi Lal Government was toppled by the Om Prakash Chautala-led INLD with the help of the BJP, which had snapped its alliance with Bansi Lal’s HVP.

After riding to power for the fourth time, Chautala started projecting himself as an amiable person by shedding his image of a vindictive politician. With this change in image, he earned popular goodwill. Finding the political situation conducive, he opted for mid-term polls in February 2000, in which his INLD secured a majority of its own. He became chief minister for the fifth time. Soon, he went back to his old ways. It did not take long for the BJP, which had helped Chautala to topple Bansi Lal, to get disillusioned by the former’s style of functioning. Since the BJP felt sidelined and thought it was losing its support base because of its keeping company with Chautala, it severed ties with him and contested the 2004 Lok Sabha and the 2005 Assembly elections on its own.

Waiting for an opportune moment, efforts were again made in early 2004 by both the HVP and the BJP for forging an alliance between the two parties. Bansi Lal’s son, Surinder Singh, met senior BJP leader L. K. Advani and secured his consent for an alliance, which, however, did not fructify.

In late 2004, Surinder Singh started lobbying with his father for merging the HVP with the Congress. Bansi Lal had been grooming his son for inheriting his political legacy and had even allowed him to join the Bhajan Lal ministry on 4 June 1982. After initially resisting Surinder Singh’s proposal for the HVP’s merger with the Congress, Bansi Lal submitted to his son’s wishes. The HVP merged with the Congress on 14 October 2004.

Bansi Lal was, however, unhappy with his son’s attitude who, he felt, was not keeping him informed regularly about the important political developments.

During one of his frequent bouts of illness, Bansi Lal in 2004 (a couple of years before he died) remarked: ‘It is the daughters more than their sons who look after their fathers in old age.’ His obvious reference was to his daughter Saroj Siwach (an Indian Administrative Service officer) who had been taking care of him. Her husband, Dr Kartar Singh, a former director of the Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow, later became the head of the Department of Gastroenterology, Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, the post from which he retired in 2013.

***

Old habits, it is said, die hard.

In his 1999–2005 tenure, it did not take long for Chautala to revert to his old vindictive ways. His excesses and his arrogance earned him the wrath of the people, including a large section of Jats, his party’s main support base. As a result, the INLD was routed in the February 2005 Assembly elections. It could secure only nine out of the Assembly’s 90 seats, not enough to earn the outgoing ruling party even the status of a recognized opposition party and Chautala the status of opposition leader in the Assembly.

The Congress, which swept the polls (winning 67 out of 90 seats), chose Bhupinder Singh Hooda, son of the late Chaudhury Ranbir Singh (a prominent freedom fighter and the last surviving member of Constituent Assembly) to lead the Congress Legislative Party. He took over as chief minister on 5 March 2005.

Surinder Singh was among those inducted into the new government as agriculture minister.

Tragedy soon struck the Bansi Lal family. On 31 March 2005, Surinder Singh and his senior ministerial colleague, Om Prakash Jindal (chief of the Jindal group of industries and father of Naveen Jindal who was later elected as Lok Sabha member on the Congress ticket), were killed in a helicopter crash in Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur district. It was a broken-hearted Bansi Lal who lamented: ‘I am an unfortunate father.’ He could not recover from the shock and, almost a year later, died in New Delhi on 28 March 2006.

***

Bhupinder Singh Hooda’s selection by the Congress high command as chief minister infuriated Bhajan Lal, who had nursed the ambition of again occupying that post. His contention was that it was because of his efforts as the state Congress president that the party had returned to power.

Bhajan Lal and his younger son, Kuldeep Bishnoi (an MP), maintained a low profile but continued firing occasional barbs at the Central leadership.

Politics, it is said, is the art of the possible. When a person who has skilfully practised the art of occupying high political offices sees no possibility of repeating his known expertise in floor-crossing, he has no other alternative but to vacate the space for others. Finding himself in such a situation, a helpless Bhajan Lal resigned from the post of Haryana Congress president in July 2006, protesting against the ‘Central leadership’s ignoring his claim to chief ministership and for sidelining his loyalists in the party organization’.

His strained ties with the party’s high command prompted him and Kuldeep Bishnoi to resign from the Congress in December 2007. They then floated the Haryana Janhit Congress. Bhajan Lal’s elder son, Chander Mohan (who was made deputy chief minister in the Hooda Government, obviously to placate the angry father after his claim for chief ministership had been rejected), however, continued to stay on in the Congress in order to retain his coveted seat of power.

***

Despite Haryana’s transformation from one of India’s most backward states into one of the fastest developing states, some of its politicians became enmeshed in unsavoury scandals. How could a son of a leader, whose forte was engineering defections, lag behind in giving a new dimension to his personal life? If, in 1937, Great Britain’s King Edward could bid goodbye to royal traditions, give up his royal title and marry a commoner (Wallis Simpson), why could not Chander Mohan sacrifice his deputy chief ministership for a woman he loved?

In December 2008, Chander Mohan deserted his wife and children and married Haryana’s assistant advocate general Anuradha Bali after both had converted to Islam and got rechristened as Chand Mohammed and Fiza. The conversion was merely to facilitate a legal second marriage, as Hindus/Sikhs are not allowed multiple marriages.

Chander Mohan did not attend office for months on end. For his prolonged absence, he was dismissed from the Hooda Government. Bhajan Lal also disowned his son for his act of bigamy.

Chander Mohan’s action was a repeat, though in a different context, of what Devi Lal had done when he disowned his son Om Prakash Chautala (in 1978) after he was caught by the Customs authorities for smuggling watches from abroad. Devi Lal had later not only ‘owned’ Chautala but also ensured that he succeeded him as Haryana chief minister. Bhajan Lal also later ‘owned’ Chander Mohan but could not restore his lost deputy chief ministership.

But the fruition of Chand Mohammed and Fiza’s love proved to be short-lived. It did not take long for the differences to crop up between the couple. Consequently, Chand Mohammed announced his separation from Fiza in January 2009, claiming that he still loved his first wife and his children and wanted to reunite with them. He converted back to Hinduism to again become Chander Mohan after a while. He was readmitted into the Bishnoi community at a brief ceremony held at the Bishnoi Mandir in Hisar on 28 July 2009 in the presence of religious leaders. In 2012, he joined his once estranged brother Kuldeep Bishnoi’s Haryana Janhit Congress.

The deserted and the infuriated Fiza vowed to take revenge on her former lover-turned-husband-turned-‘renegade’. She declared that she would contest against Chander Mohan in the next Assembly elections, a declaration she later failed to act upon. She, however, continued to make headlines because of the numerous controversies generated by her mercurial nature and petty quarrels with her neighbours in Chandigarh’s satellite town Mohali (in Punjab).

Fiza died under mysterious circumstances. On 6 August 2012, her highly decomposed body was found in a room in her Mohali house, indicating that she had died a few days earlier. The Punjab police later found huge amounts of cash and jewellery in her residence and in many bank accounts and lockers. As she had left no will, her two sisters later laid claim to Fiza’s movable and immovable assets.

***

When Bhupinder Singh Hooda, who had earlier headed the Haryana Congress Committee, took over as chief minister on 5 March 2005, many of Haryana’s seasoned political leaders considered the ‘green horn’ as inexperienced for holding the high office. They predicted that he would fail to administer the state properly. But Hooda proved all his detractors wrong. He had full backing of the party’s Central leadership. He did not take long to learn the art of politicking and outwitted his opponents, both inside the ruling party and in the opposition, and foiled their attempts to destabilize him.

Unlike some of his predecessors, particularly Om Prakash Chautala, an affable and soft-spoken Hooda did not resort to political vendetta against his opponents. Even the investigations into the serious allegations of corruption and amassing of huge assets by Chautala and his family members during his chief ministership were not entrusted to the State Vigilance Bureau, the agency often used by those in power to browbeat their political opponents. Instead, Hooda asked the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to probe the charges. After time-consuming investigations, the CBI registered cases against Om Prakash Chautala and his two sons, Ajay Chautala and Abhay Chautala, for amassing huge assets disproportionate to their known sources of income. In June 2008, they were chargesheeted by the CBI court.

In another case investigated by the CBI on the orders of the Supreme Court, the probe agency recommended to the apex court in September 2012 the registration of corruption cases against Om Prakash Chautala, Ashok Kumar Arora, ex-state transport minister, and some senior officials for irregularities in the nomination of candidates to the state civil services.

In the third case of what came to be known as ‘the JBT (junior basic teachers) recruitment scam’, Om Prakash Chautala, his heir apparent, Ajay Chautala, two IAS officers and five others were sentenced to a ten-year term in January 2013 for corruption, cheating and forgery in the recruitment of more than 3000 teachers in 1999-2000 when Chautala was the chief minister. Forty-five other state government officers were sentenced to four-year and one person to five-year jail terms. Imprisonment of the father—son duo raised questions about the Devi Lal clan’s future in the state’s power structure.

The court cases apart, Hooda’s strategy of mobilizing Jat support for the Congress also helped the party in making deep inroads into the Devi Lal clan’s main support base (the Jat community), which had become alienated from the INLD due to Chautala’s supercilious and vindictive behaviour when he was chief minister.

Declaring Bansi Lal as his role model, Hooda ensured that the pace of development picked up from the stage where it had been left by Bansi Lal in 1975. Under Hooda, Haryana attracted huge foreign investment, leading to rapid industrial growth. Hooda’s adversaries both inside and outside the ruling party, however, criticized him for concentrating on development of his home district Rohtak and the areas around it at the cost of the rest of the state.

Complacency and overconfidence sometimes prove counterproductive in politics. This happened in Haryana when Hooda decided to go in for mid-term polls in 2009, a year ahead of schedule. His optimism of returning for a second term was based on the development he had undertaken in the state and the freebies and doles he had granted. The anti-incumbency sentiment and the police action his government had taken against Jats on different issues, however, reduced the Congress tally. It could secure only 40 seats in the 90-member Assembly (as against 67 in 2005). The main reason for the ruling party’s setback was the shifting of loyalties by a large section of Jat voters back to the INLD. It was the massive Jat support Hooda had managed to secure in the 2005 Assembly elections that had helped the Congress to form its government.

***

The politics of defection, for which Haryana had earned notoriety over the years, was again in evidence, though this time it was not attributable to Bhajan Lal, its accomplished practitioner. Now it was the amiable Hooda, who, moving fast, was able to again take over as chief minister on 25 October 2009 after managing to secure the support of seven independents by enticing them with ministerial berths. Soon after that, five of the six Bhajan Lal-led Haryana Janhit Congress MLAs were also won over. They joined the Congress, raising the party’s strength to 45. Later, the Congress’s tally rose to 46 after it won a by-election, thereby giving it a majority of its own in the Assembly.

Among the independents who had lent support to Hooda, thereby helping him capture power, was Gopal Goyal Kanda. He was appointed minister of state and given the important portfolios of home and industry. He was later accused of abetting the suicide of his defunct airlines’ airhostess Geetika Sharma who took her own life on 5 August 2012 in Delhi. (In her suicide note, she had blamed Kanda.) Kanda who ignored calls for interrogation by the Delhi Police was later declared absconder. He, however, dramatically surrendered (to the Delhi Police) a few days after the issue of police summons.

Kanda’s case generated a nation-wide controversy about the devilish ways of functioning of some businessmen-turned-politicians and the tremendous influence they manage to wield. A small-time footwear merchant a few years ago, Kanda’s meteoric rise in the world of business and politics within a short period was indicated by his becoming the owner of a number of companies and an airline which, however, soon became defunct. He offered lucrative key positions to women (for whom he was known to have a weakness) in his airlines and in other companies.

His proximity to Om Prakash Chautala (when he was chief minister) helped Kanda in establishing a flourishing real estate business, particularly in the fast expanding Gurgaon region, during the INLD’s 2000–05 regime.

Given Haryana’s dubious history of the ‘Aya Ram Gaya Ram’ variety of politics, Kanda’s ascendancy was not surprising. He started hobnobbing with Congressmen when the INLD, during whose regime he had flourished, was routed in the 2005 Assembly polls. In the 2009 Assembly elections, he challenged the Chautalas in their pocket borough by contesting and winning the Sirsa Assembly seat as an independent.

***

Let us return to Hooda and his activities.

The functioning of the Hooda-led Congress Government threw up divergent political and economic trends. If, in the first term, the Congress victory in the 2005 elections ensured political stability, the outcome of the prematurely held 2009 elections demonstrated the revival of defection politics.

In the economic arena, the pace of development in the state picked up, accelerating the growth rate to 9.3 per cent, much higher than the national average. But the negative trends in Haryana’s economy were reflected by the state’s turning from a revenue-surplus to a revenue-deficit one.

Even as the state attracted huge amounts of foreign direct investment, the main focus of which was the Gurgaon—Manesar—Faridabad belt (adjoining the national capital), the Hooda Government came under attack for the deteriorating law and order situation, power shortages and the role of caste-based khap panchayats. Such panchayats issued diktats that created an environment responsible for a slew of ‘honour killings’, i.e., if someone married outside his or her caste or religion or if the boy and the girl belonged to the same gotra (lineage) or the same village, because then they were considered brother and sister.

But the two crucial issues that tarnished the Hooda Government’s image were the spate of rapes during the second half of his government’s second term and the release of vast amounts of farmers’ and panchayat lands, acquisitioned by the government for ‘public purposes’, to builders, real estate agents and those with political clout.

In this context, it would be pertinent to refer to the DLF1—Robert Vadra land deal case. (Robert Vadra is the son-in-law of Congress President Sonia Gandhi, who is also the chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance or UPA.)

The controversy with regard to this case was generated due to the cancellation, by a 1991-batch IAS officer Ashok Khemka, of the mutation (change in the use of land, say, from agriculture to construction of buildings) of a 3.5-acre tract in Gurgaon’s Shikohpur village. This tract was sold by Robert Vadra to realty major DLF.

The case in brief is that Khemka, after being transferred on 11 October 2012 from the posts of director general, consolidation of holdings, and inspector general, registration, had on 12 and 15 October ordered an inquiry into the alleged undervaluation of assets owned by Vadra or his companies in Gurgaon, Faridabad, Palwal and Mewat districts (all four in Haryana) and had set aside the mutation of the aforementioned 3.5-acre tract.

An official committee, which conducted an inquiry into the whole matter, primarily held Khemka liable for administrative misconduct in that he had overstepped his jurisdiction by passing orders to cancel the 3.5-acre land deal. The committee also accused him of indulging in criticism of the state government policies and recommended disciplinary action against him.

***

In the context of releasing huge portions of farmers’ and panchayat lands acquisitioned by the government for public purposes to builders and real estate agents, let me reproduce relevant excerpts from my 30 September 2012 Currents and Undercurrents syndicated column illustrating the negative trends that had emerged in Haryana’s socio-political and economic spheres:

The Haryana Government finds itself in the dock for all the wrong reasons. After the controversies over khap panchayats’ diktats, atrocities on Dalits, releasing of large chunks of land to builders and realtors and growing protests over power cuts, it is now the spate of gang rapes of young girls which is making headlines …

Sociologists may argue that one of the main reasons for the rising number of rapes is the fallout of the changed socio-economic conditions particularly in the relatively more advanced states. Another reason is the easy accessibility to porn websites to the growing tribe of Internet-savvy young men. Another reason could be the impact on the young minds of the overexposure of the female body in our movies.

Whatever the reasons, the spurt in Haryana’s crime graph, particularly against women, calls for a major surgical operation in the police force and [for] stringent measures to check deterioration in law and order. Cynics may argue what can be expected from a government whose home minister himself is behind bars facing the charge of abetting suicide by one of his own company’s women employees who had commented against his attitude towards women?

The biggest single issue which has brought disrepute to the Haryana government is the acquisitioning of land for public purposes and releasing large chunks of these lands to builders and realtors and permitting even their land-use change. Several such decisions have invited courts’ indictments.

In [its] latest indictment the Punjab and Haryana High Court has commented that the Haryana Government discriminated by going ahead with the acquisition of land owned by poor farmers while exempting ‘huge chunks of land owned by builders in Sirsa’. The High Court’s Division Bench quashed the acquisition proceedings.

These factors are among some of the major reasons for the rising anti-incumbency sentiment in the state. This is a warning signal for the Congress and its government in Haryana when only two years are left for the Assembly and Lok Sabha polls [both due in 2014].

When the health starts showing signs of worsening, the only remedy is surgery. And the remedy is applicable to the human body as also to matters of governance. Haryana’s governance faces such a situation today.

No doubt, the amiable Bhupinder Singh Hooda has done a commendable job in the development arena. He also has been able to win the confidence of the party’s Central leadership. But he cannot be oblivious of the reality of pragmatic politics that if the Central leadership finds that the party might lose the elections due to lax governance, it usually undertakes a major operation in the state party leadership …

Primarily, it is the lax governance and the loose grip over the bureaucracy which are responsible for the present situation in Haryana. It is time for Hooda to undertake a major surgical operation in Haryana’s governance.

While the beginning of the twenty-first century witnessed divergent political and economic trends in Haryana, it also saw the sunset of Haryana’s three famous Lals – Bansi Lal, Devi Lal and Bhajan Lal – who had not only dominated the state’s politics for nearly four decades but two of them (Devi Lal and Bansi Lal) had also played important roles in national politics. Devi Lal died on 6 April 2001, Bansi Lal on 28 March 2006 and Bhajan Lal on 3 June 2011. All the three were victims of heart failure.

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1 Delhi Land and Finance.