Kurukshetra: Entering politics may still be a distant dream for the wife of Haryana Chief Minister and BJP leader Nayab Singh Saini, but she has already taken the road to reduce the widening distance with the electorate while campaigning on his behalf owing to his pre-occupation in other constituencies.
The BJP is eyeing a hat-trick of wins in the state under the leadership Saini, a non-Jat but Other Backward Classes (OBC) leader.
The last election was fought under the leadership of Manohar Lal Khattar, who was at the helm for nearly nine-and-a-half years till March 2024, paving the way for the next Chief Minister.
First-time Chief Minister Saini’s wife Suman Saini is campaigning aggressively on the new battleground of her hubby, that is largely rural.
The Ladwa Assembly constituency, part of the Kurukshetra parliamentary seat, has a population of 22.6 per cent Scheduled Castes, besides 7.4 per cent from the Saini community.
Saini was keen to re-enter the poll fray from Karnal, the seat he won in the June bypoll when he replaced Manohar Lal Khattar as the Chief Minister.
However, the BJP leadership considers Ladwa, which came into existence in 2007, the safest seat for Saini as the party polled 47.14 per cent of the votes in the June parliamentary polls.
Banking on the performance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the national level and her husband’s predecessor Khattar’s public welfare programmes in the state, on an average Saini’s wife is holding 15-16 public meetings, besides attending social gatherings, every day and does not hesitate to fold her hands and bow her head before commoners to seek votes for the party.
With local knowledge, openness, and good communication, she’s turning out to be a hit among the masses as she understands, “People don’t care until they know how much you care.”
A party spokesperson told IANS that since Chief Minister Saini, under whose leadership the party is going to the polls, is touring across the state and not devoting much time to his constituency, his wife Suman along with close-knit family members has been canvassing extensively on his behalf, giving no opportunity to his rivals to say that the candidate is missing from the scene.
“She (Suman) starts campaigning as early as 8 A.M. and after holding 15-16 public meetings till 7 P.M., she prefers to interact with people at one place to understand problems and grievances and that continues till late night,” said the spokesperson.
The spokesperson added, “CM Saini, despite his hectic schedule, spared some time to campaign in Ladwa too. On Monday he staged a road show in Ladwa town. Today his election programme was cancelled at the last minute owing to his busy schedule elsewhere.”
On being asked whether she was campaigning for her husband, Suman replied, “I am seeking votes for ‘kamal’ (lotus).”
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Saini contested and won from the Kurukshetra constituency, defeating the Congress’ Nirmal Singh by a huge margin.
A confidant of Khattar, Saini entered politics almost 30 years ago. He was elected as an MLA from Naraingarh in the 2014 Assembly polls and inducted in the Cabinet in 2016.
On September 15, BJP senior-most leader and five-time legislator Anil Vij asserted that he would stake a claim for the chief minister’s post if the party returned to power in the October 5 Assembly polls.
Rebutting his claims spontaneously, the party’s state incharge, Dharmendra Pradhan, said the party would achieve a hat-trick of wins under Saini’s leadership and he’s the BJP’s chief ministerial face.
Khattar in October 2019 was sworn in as the Chief Minister of Haryana where the BJP formed a government, the state’s first non-Congress government at the helm for the second-consecutive term.
In the second term, the BJP formed the government in alliance with the then newly-formed Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) led by Dushyant Chautala, who took oath as Deputy Chief Minister.
This time the BJP is going solo in the polls.
Saini has been facing barbs from his rivals with the JJP chief Dushyant Chautala calling him a “kati patang (kite with no strings)”, while the principal Opposition Congress has been saying that the Chief Minister “does not have the courage to contest from Karnal, cannot go back to his earlier seat of Naraingarh and chose Ladwa thinking it is a safe seat. He will not be able to succeed there as well”.
The Congress has retained sitting legislator Mewa Singh to take on Chief Minister Saini.
Mewa Singh defeated BJP’s Pawan Saini in 2019 by 12,637 votes.
(Vishal Gulati can be contacted at vishal.g@ians.in)
–IANS