Chandigarh, May 17 (Inditop) Repeating a nine out of 10 seats performance for the second time in five years may not have been a situation that the ruling Congress in Haryana would have imagined. But the 2009 Lok Sabha election results in the state have shown that Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda is firmly in command in the state with his development plank.
The victory for the ruling Congress in Haryana has come just 10 months before the state holds elections for its 90-seat assembly.
The sole seat that the Congress could not manage to win this time was Hisar where former Congressman and former chief minister Bhajan Lal won by a small margin of less than 7,000 votes. He contested on the Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC) ticket – a party floated recently by him and his son Kuldeep Bishnoi.
The Congress had won nine seats in the 2004 general elections also.
Hooda’s son, Deepinder Singh Hooda, 31, returned with the highest margin among all candidates – a whopping lead of 445,736 votes over his Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) rival on the Rohtak seat.
The lowest Congress margin was for outgoing union minister Selja who won by over 14,500 votes from the Ambala (reserved) seat.
Billionaire steel tycoon Naveen Jindal too retained his Kurukshetra seat by a margin of over 118,000 votes. He beat the INLD state president Ashok Kumar Arora.
In fact, the INLD, which was in an alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the state, was completely routed on most seats.
The closest its candidate came to victory was on the Hisar seat where former Haryana finance minister Sampat Singh (INLD) lost to Bhajan Lal by under 7,000 votes.
The INLD-BJP alliance was hoping to make major gains in this election to be able to put up a challenge to Hooda and the Congress in the forthcoming assembly polls in February-March next year.
“If Bihar and Gujarat Chief Ministers Nitish Kumar and Narendra Modi have been winning on the development plank, Hooda-ji has also shown that development works with people. We will win the assembly polls also easily. The opposition has been wiped out,” a minister in the Hooda government said.
Hooda’s development plank includes getting major investments into the state, building roads, townships, industrial areas, and setting up power plants and other infrastructure development.
Unlike neighbouring Punjab, where the entire family of Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and Akali Dal President and Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Badal were campaigning for Sukhbir’s wife Harsimrat Kaur on the high-profile Bathinda seat, Hooda not only ensured that his son won from Rohtak by one of the biggest margins but also ensured victory of most other Congress candidates.
Hooda and his son campaigned outside the state and their constituency respectively – sure of victory for themselves and the Congress.
The result has once again put Hooda firmly in control of the state and the party – to lead both after the next assembly polls.
rounak