Down a long corridor in the Chandigarh Secretariat, past the door that warns, ‘Only for CM’, is the office of Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda. “I am of the view that whatever Haryana’s Sikhs feel must be taken into consideration,” says Hooda, as he denies having received the report of the Chatha Committee that his Government had set up to examine the demand for a separate gurdwara management body for Haryana.

The Congress is believed to have included the demand for a separate gurdwara management body to win over the Sikh vote. According to the 2001 census, Sikhs account for about 5.54 per cent of the Haryana’s population.

What is also well known is that Haryana’s Sikh vote has traditionally been mobilised by the SAD(B) for Devi Lal and then his son Om Prakash Chautala’s party. After 1984, the anti-Congress vote headed in that direction even more. By all accounts, the 2005 Assembly elections — also the one in which the Congress manifesto included the demand for a separate gurdwara management body for Haryana — constituted a break in the story. According to a CSDS survey, 50 per cent of the Sikh vote in Haryana went to the Congress in 2004, and only 35 per cent to Chautala’s INLD.

Now, Hooda is keeping mum about the Ad Hoc Haryana Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee’s (HSGPC) demand, while, officially, the Punjab Congress is also keeping quiet.

But the Akalis are not holding their fire. They locked horns with the HSGPC (ad hoc) on the facts: in the SAD(B) version, from 2003-2008, the SGPC got Rs 14,63,29,449 from all the Haryana gurdwaras and spent Rs 27,88,79,000 in the state — nearly double the amount collected. They also emphasise the body’s ‘national’ character. “The SGPC represents the entire Sikh community,” says SGPC chief Avtar Singh Makkar.

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