12 family members of three ex-Haryana CMs battle it out in Assembly polls

Chandigarh, Sep 14 (IANS) The legacy of three Lals -- Devi Lal, Bansi Lal and Bhajan Lal, who ruled Haryana for nearly three decades, is witnessing the second or third or fourth generations battling it out in the elections for the 90 Assembly seats that will go to the polls on October 5.

Altogether, 12 members of the ‘Lal’ clans are in the fray, and many of them are competing with either each other or even one another to seize power.

While two family members of the three-time Chief Minister and two-time Union Minister Bansi Lal are trying their electoral luck, a son and a grandson of the stalwart and three-time Chief Minister Bhajan Lal are also in the fray.

Likewise, eight kin of the breakaway state’s family-ruled regional political faction, the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), formed by former Deputy Prime Minister Devi Lal, are contesting.

Three of them, one each from the INLD, the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP), INLD’s breakaway faction, and the Congress, are in the fray from the Dabwali seat in the Sirsa district. From Rania seat, also in Sirsa, Devi Lal’s two clans are facing each other.

The most interesting fight is from Dabwali where the INLD has fielded Aditya Devi Lal, 45, a grandson of Devi Lal, while Congress has retained its sitting legislator Amit Sihag, 43, who is the son of Devi Lal’s nephew Kamlveer Singh, and JJP nominated Digvijay Chautala, 33, the younger brother of former Deputy Chief Minister Dushyant Chautala, who is a great-grandson of Devi Lal.

The Devi Lal clans, the Chautalas, are deeply rooted in Dabwali’s political landscape from where the INLD retained the seat from 2000 to 2019.

Sihag’s father is the uncle of Ajay and Abhay Chautala, both sons of five-time Chief Minister O.P. Chautala. BJP turncoat Aditya Devi Lal switched sides as he got annoyed that his name was not announced by the BJP in its first list of 67 candidates. While in the BJP, he was the chairman of Haryana State Agriculture Marketing Board.

In the 2019 assembly polls, Aditya, then a BJP nominee, faced defeat from Sihag by a margin of 15,647 votes.

The state-ruling BJP has fielded Baldev Singh Mangiana, who hails from the Jat community, from Dabwali.

Political observers told IANS that Dabwali is the most closely watched seat in the state with multiple candidates from once one prominent political family vying for dominance.

Another direct fratricidal battle between the grandchildren of one of the state’s tallest leaders, the late Bansi Lal, who was known to be a tough administrator, is for the family citadel Tosham in Bhiwani district, one of the state’s Jat heartlands.

The ballot battle is largely between Congress turncoat and BJP’s Shruti Choudhry, whose mother Kiran Choudhry won this seat four straight times from 2005 bypoll, and Congress and political greenhorn Anirudh Chaudhary, a son of Ranbir Mahendra, former President of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), turning all eyes on one of the high-profile seats.

Both are grandchildren of a politically influential Jat family of Lal, who was the Chief Minister three times and former defence minister, the first being in 1968 and the last from 1996 to 1999.

While Kiran Choudhry, now a BJP member in the Upper House, is Bansi Lal’s daughter-in-law, Mahendra is his estranged son.

Political observers say from Tosham, from where Bansi Lal and his clan have won nine out of 12 Assembly polls, the third generation is trying to save the family legacy by contesting as Congress and BJP nominees.

This is the second time that Bansi Lal's clan is fighting elections against each other. In 1998, Shruti’s father Surender Singh defeated Anirudh’s father Ranbir Singh from the Bhiwani Lok Sabha seat. At that time, Surender contested as the Haryana Vikas Party candidate, while Ranbir was a Congress nominee.

From Tosham, if the contest remains straight between the Congress and the BJP, the political observer adds, there will be both a win and defeat of the architect of modern Haryana.

The Bansi Lal dynasty is trying to save the family legacy, and so is the late Bhajan Lal's family.

Bhajan Lal’s son Chander Mohan, a former Deputy Chief Minister, has been fielded from Panchkula by the Congress.

Bhajan Lal’s grandson Bhavya Bishnoi has been fielded by the BJP from the Adampur seat, considered the family bastion.

Chander Mohan ditched politics for love in 2008. He embraced Islam and changed his name to Chand Mohammad and married a woman, who was a former Deputy Advocate General in Punjab.

Dura Ram, a BJP candidate from Fatehabad, is also related to the Bhajan Lal family.

Another family member of former Deputy Prime Minister Devi Lal in the poll arena is his son Ranjit Singh, an outgoing Cabinet minister, who has fielded himself as an Independent from Rania in Sirsa district after the BJP denied him a ticket.

The Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), now headed by O.P. Chautala, has fielded Devi Lal's grandson Abhay Singh Chautala from Ellenabad in Sirsa and Sunaina Chautala from Fatehabad.

INLD's breakaway faction Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) has also fielded two family members -- Ajay’s son Dushyant Chautala from Uchana Kalan in Jind district.

Dushyant parted ways with the INLD in December 2018 after a bitter split in the party and the Chautala family.

The INLD was founded in October 1996 as Haryana Lok Dal (Rashtriya) by Devi Lal, who served as Deputy Prime Minister of India in the VP Singh Cabinet.

His son O.P. Chautala is the current president. The party was renamed into its current name in 1998.

Bhajan Lal was a non-Jat leader, while Devi Lal was regarded as a Jat leader with mass rural support.

(Vishal Gulati can be reached at vishal.g@ians.in)

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