A fortnight from now Haryana, once famous for its Aya Rams and Gaya Rams, elects a new assembly. Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda’s gambit of advancing elections by over six months, to build on the Congress’s haul of nine of the 10 Lok Sabha seats this May, has set the stage for a very interesting electoral battle.

The opposition, already in disarray after the Lok Sabha verdict, was further hobbled by Hooda subsequently roping in rebels from other parties and accommodating them as Congress candidates. The erudite Sampat Singh, a former finance minister once seen as the sober face of Om Prakash Chautala’s Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), and a couple of other senior leaders of the party like former MPs Sushil Indora and Kailasho Saini were inducted in the Congress and have been fielded as party candidates. Similarly, two former ministers, Subhash Batra and Krishnamurti Hooda, from the Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC) and one BJP MLA, Ram Kumar Gautam, too joined the Congress. Besides, all nine independents in the dissolved assembly have been inducted in the Congress and five of them are now contesting as Congress candidates.

But what may prove to be most fortuitous for the Congress is that, for the first time since the state’s formation in 1966, the opposition parties have not been able to form an alliance. Thus the state would witness five-cornered contests, with the Congress being challenged by the INLD, the BJP, the BSP and the HJC in all the 90 constituencies — and then there are the independents. It is not that these parties did not try to forge alliances. The BSP had formally declared an alliance with the HJC, which is headed by former chief minister Bhajan Lal’s son Kuldeep Bishnoi. Problems cropped up when Mayawati refused to go along with Bishnoi’s demand that he be projected as the chief ministerial candidate of the alliance.

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