How BJP become a foremost choice of voters in Haryana
With a clean sweep in the Lok Sabha elections in 2019, the party is eyeing a win in the state assembly polls and retain its government.
In the past few decades, voters have shown their trust towards the BJP to make the most dominant party in Haryana, this is major because of strong drift of voters from other parties to BJP.
For many years, the BJP had played the role of a junior partner to the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), and earlier to the Haryana Vikas Party in the state.
Haryana witnessed the biggest change in state politics since 2014 marked as the collapse of the INLD. In 2014, the INLD had stood second overall and received almost one-fourth of the votes. A few months before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Dushyant Chautala was expelled from the INLD following a bitter tussle with uncle Abhay Chautala. The young leader launched the Jannayak Janata Party (JJP) which managed to get 4.9% votes in its very first election. The INLD fared worse and could gather merely 1.9% votes.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP vote share increased by more than 24 percentage compared to the previous Lok Sabha elections and it received a staggering 58% of the votes.
In nine out of the ten Lok Sabha seats, the BJP received more than half of the votes. Despite the merger of Kuldeep Bishnoi’s Haryana Janhit Congress, the Congress’s gains were modest as its vote share increased only 5.5 percentage between 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections to 28.4%. The last few days marked by heavy infighting within the Congress and the party leadership struggled to convince senior leader and former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda against quitting the party. As he created a buzz that along with his party workers, he is quitting the party and forming a new party. But finally, congress succeeded to convince him and manage him to stay with Congress.
However, voters also believe that opposition in the state is very weak and unable to criticize the present BJP government on their shortcomings like slow economic growth, unemployment etc. If these issues are kept by the opposition as the main agenda then this will gain them a better vote share, as, despite strong aid from central government, the state government is unable to keep their all the promises made in 2014 assembly polls.
