Hooda's continued dominance in party appointments sparks unease in Haryana Congress

Rao Narender takes over from Udai Bhan, who had resigned as the Haryana Pradesh Congress Committee chief shortly after the party, widely tipped to win the polls, ended up on the losing side for a third consecutive election with 37 seats against the BJP’s 48 in the 90-member assembly.

Turf war

The year-long delay in the Congress’s decision to name the CLP chief, who would also serve as the Leader of Opposition in the assembly, and anoint a new PCC president, was because of the internecine turf war in the Haryana Congress between Hooda and his rivals such as Sirsa MP Kumari Selja, former Union minister Birender Singh and former MLAs Capt Ajay Singh Yadav and Randeep Singh Surjewala.

The 78-year-old Hooda, under whose stewardship the Congress has lost the last three consecutive assembly elections in the state, banked on the support he enjoys among an overwhelming majority of the Congress’ 37 MLAs as well as on the hold he commands over Haryana’s sizeable Jat population to retain his status as the CLP chief.

His rivals, on the other hand, had been imploring the Congress high command to extricate the party from “Hooda’s chokehold”; arguing that the Jat leader neither enjoyed the confidence of party workers beyond those from his own community nor held the electoral sway he once boasted of.

Sources told The Federal that Selja, Surjewala and Yadav had also made it known to their party bosses in Delhi that it was “impossible” for them to work with Hooda given his “arrogance” and “refusal to take senior leaders along in the party’s decision-making process”.

And yet, as the Congress finally chose to act on the appointments after leaving the Haryana unit headless and the state Assembly devoid of a Leader of Opposition for an entire year, it once again chose to stamp Hooda’s dominance.

Not only did the high command retain the Jat strongman from Rohtak as its CLP chief but even gave in to his pressure to have his acolyte, Rao Narender, lead the PCC in place of Udai Bhan, who was also a known Hooda loyalist.

Uneasy calm

Sources in the party said that the high command, which was keen on appointing a backward caste leader as the PCC chief in a break from its recent tradition of keeping the post reserved for Dalits, did weigh in the possibility of picking a Hooda rival for the job to “balance factional feuds”.

Among those the party considered for the job was former Rewari MLA Chiranjeev Rao, son of Capt Ajay Yadav, before finally settling for Rao Narender Singh.

Soon after Congress general secretary (Organisation) KC Venugopal released the press statement naming the CLP and PCC chiefs, sources in the Haryana Congress told The Federal that an “uneasy calm” had besieged the party.

“It is good that the appointments have finally been made because the absence of both CLP leader and PCC chief had practically brought all organisational activity to a halt for a year but the way the high command has dealt with the issue by completely surrendering to bullying tactics of one man (Hooda); it is not good. You can feel the anger and frustration if you speak to party leaders who are not from that faction,” a senior party leader and former MLA said.

Though Selja, Hooda’s most prominent intra-party rival, congratulated both Hooda and Rao Narender, Surjewala maintained a stoic silence, refusing to comment on the appointments when The Federal reached out to him.

'Morale fallen'

Capt Ajay Yadav, a former five-term MLA, who until a year ago was also the national chairman of the Congress’ OBC department, chose to make his dissent public.

“Given the continuously declining graph of the Congress Party in Haryana, the party needs to introspect regarding the decision taken today. Rahul Gandhi’s wish was that the president of Haryana Congress should be a person whose image is completely clean, spotless, and representative of young leadership. However, today's decision appears to be exactly the opposite... the morale of the party workers and cadre has completely fallen,” Yadav wrote on X.

The former five-term Rewari MLA, said sources close to him, did not directly criticise Hooda’s appointment but his decision to speak out against fellow Yadav, Rao Narender’s appointment as PCC chief was seen as an “indirect hit at Hooda”.

Congress sources in the Hooda camp, however, said that the party high command had “gone by the wishes of the majority in the legislature party who wanted Hooda as their leader” and that “Rao Narender’s appointment was not to appease any camp but to signal a conscious shift in strategy”.

Jat-Dalit combine strategy

Over the past decade, the Congress, while relying largely on Hooda to steer the party’s legislative bloc in the Assembly, had continuously picked Dalit leaders to lead the PCC, thereby attempting a Jat-Dalit consolidation in leadership.

The Jats constitute an estimated 28 percent of Haryana’s population while the Dalits make up another 21 percent. As such, with Hooda leading the MLAs and a Dalit leading the PCC, the party tried to give representation in leadership to nearly half the state’s population, hoping that the strategy would also strengthen the party’s poll prospects.

The past decade, however, showed the limitations of this strategy as the BJP, by steering clear of naming a Jat CM, tried to build a Jat versus non-Jat narrative in the state, accusing the Congress of appeasing only the former under Hooda’s influence. The poll results too showed the BJP performing exceedingly well in areas where Jat vote split between the Congress, the Indian National Lok Dal and later its splinter group, the Jananayak Janata Party; all of which tried to chase Jat votes.

The BJP, meanwhile, consolidated both forward and backward caste votes while also chipping away at the Congress’s base among Dalit voters.

With Rao Narender’s appointment, the Congress has tried a course-correction but one whose outcome may not necessarily be to the party’s liking.

“This is a very tricky strategy and it will backfire. The Dalits were already upset at the way the Congress treated Kumari Selja and Phool Chand Mullana or even Ashok Tanwar, who became PCC chiefs but always had to play second fiddle to Hooda. Even with Udai Bhan, who was a Hooda loyalist, we sent out a wrong message because after the 2024 election defeat it was Bhan who lost the post of PCC chief while Hooda has once again come out unscathed. Will the Dalits not feel slighted? Are we trying to convey to them that they are dispensable but Hooda is not?” asked a Haryana Congress veteran.

The senior leader quoted above added further, “As far as reaching out to backward castes is concerned; it may be a good move but the real question to ask is whether Rao Narender is the right man for the job?”.

Curious pick

Rao Narender, many in the Haryana Congress say, is a curious pick for the PCC chief’s job.

A former three-term MLA who represented the Ateli assembly segment twice and the Narnaul seat once – both constituencies in the Mahendragarh district, Rao Narender lost the 2014, 2019 and 2024 assembly polls from Narnaul. In the 2014 and 2019 polls, he had finished a distant third, while his last victory, back in 2009, was not on a Congress ticket but as a candidate of Kuldeep Bishnoi’s now-defunct Haryana Janhit Congress.

It was his 2009 victory that had, in fact, brought Rao Narender close to Hooda. In that election, the Congress had emerged as the single largest party in the state assembly but was six seats shy of the majority mark of 46 seats. It was Rao Narender, who played a key role in getting the Congress – and Hooda – closer to power after he along with four other MLAs of the HJC, defected to the Congress within weeks of the results, leaving the HJC with just Kuldeep Bishnoi as its lone MLA in the assembly.

Bishnoi later merged his HJC with the Congress but his turf war with Hooda continued till 2022 when he finally resigned from the party and switched to the BJP. Rao Narender, however, remained with the Congress, serving first as a minister in Hooda’s government and then as a trusted aide of the Jat leader through the past decade of Congress’s exile from power in the state.

Backward caste outreach

Congress sources said with Rao Narender leading the PCC, the party plans to intensify its backward caste outreach in the state, especially in Haryana’s Ahirwal region, which has a sizable chunk of Ahir (Yadav) voters.

In the 2024 polls, it was the BJP’s sweep of the Ahirwal belt, comprising 11 seats spread across the Gurgaon, Mahendragarh and Rewari districts, which played a big role in the saffron party’s return to power. The BJP won 10 of the 11 seats in this belt, banking heavily on former Union minister Rao Inderjit Singh, who it imported from the Congress back in 2014, to deliver the Ahir votes.

Interestingly, the 2024 polls also marked the victorious electoral debut of Rao Inderjit’s daughter Arti Rao from the Ateli constituency, which Rao Narender had represented twice between 1996 and 2005.

Congress sources say in Rao Narender the party wants to cultivate a leader who can counter Rao Inderjit’s hold over the Ahirwal region. With a poor electoral record of his own against Inderjit’s six consecutive Lok Sabha wins and proven clout over Ahirwal, the new PCC chief, who has the added baggage of being branded a ‘Hooda man’ by rival factions within the party, has his task cut out.

As do Hooda and the Congress party in Haryana.