New Delhi:

After pointing to a comfortable victory for the Congress, leads for Haryana are now showing that the BJP is set for a hat-trick in the state. As of 1.47 pm, the BJP is ahead in 50 of the state’s 90 Assembly constituencies while the Congress is leading in 34. 

An aggregate of seven exit polls predicted that the Congress will win 55 seats, 10 more than the halfway mark of 45, while the BJP will emerge victorious in 26. 

While celebrations began outside the Congress headquarters in New Delhi even before the counting started, with party supporters dancing as dhols were being played, Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini expressed confidence that the BJP will form the government in Haryana for the third straight time. 

“We have done a lot of development work in the past 10 years. The kind of system set up by former Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar will continue to bring benefits for Haryana for a long time. It is our responsibility to take this good work forward,” Mr Saini, who took over as the chief minister from Mr Khattar in March, told reporters this morning. 

After leads pointed to the BJP forming a government in the state again, Congress supporters toned down the celebrations but said they were still confident that the party would win.

Senior BJP leaders have also gathered at Mr Khattar’s residence in New Delhi to discuss government formation, sources said, The attendees include the party’s Haryana elections in-charge Dharmendra Pradhan and co-in-charge Biplab Kumar Deb.

Congress Letter

The Congress has, meanwhile, written a letter to the Election Commission, complaining of an “unexplained slowdown” in updating results for the Haryana election.

“As you can imagine, this allows bad-faith actors to spin narratives that undermine the process. You can see examples of it already playing out on social media. Our fear is also that such narratives can then be used by these mala fide actors to influence processes where counting is still underway i.e. in most of the counting centres,” senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh wrote in the letter.

2019 Result

In the last Assembly elections in Haryana in 2019, the BJP had won 40 seats, the Congress 31 and the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) 10. The BJP formed the government with the support of the JJP and Dushyant Chautala became the deputy chief minister. The post-poll alliance ended when Mr Saini became the chief minister. 

The BJP won only five of the state’s 10 Lok Sabha seats in Haryana after sweeping all of them in 2019 and the Assembly elections in the state as well as Jammu and Kashmir are an opportunity for the party to prove that it remains popular with voters after failing – for the first time in 10 years – to achieve a majority on its own in the general elections.

For the Congress, the stakes are arguably even higher because the party had been nearly written off after its massive defeats in the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Congress leaders have been citing the party’s haul of 99 seats in this year’s general elections and the performance of the INDIA alliance to talk of a resurgence, and the results in both Haryana and J&K are being seen as a test of that theory.