M A I N   N E W S

INLD poised for hat trick in Rori
From Yoginder Gupta
Tribune News Service

RORI (Sirsa): Mr Abhey Singh Chautala, the younger son of Haryana Chief Minister and INLD supremo Om Prakash Chautala, is all set to score a hat trick in the Rori Assembly constituency for his party, which won the seat successively in the 1996 and 2000 assembly elections.

Rori is scheduled to go in for a byelection on May 26. The seat fell vacant when the elder Chautala resigned from here because he had been elected from Narwana also.

The ruling party is so confident of its victory that Abhey has declared that he would not appoint any polling agent. His father has not come to campaign for him as he is convalescing after a minor surgery. Of course, his elder brother Ajay, who is the MP from Bhiwani and heads the youth wing of the party, is there to extend a brotherly hand in the campaign.

Though Abhey is seeking entry to the Haryana Vidhan Sabha for the first time, he is no stranger to the people of Rori. He had been looking after the electioneering of his father in the past. He had also been nursing the constituency on behalf of his father.

By putting up a lightweight candidate the Congress has only helped the INLD. An impression has gone in the constituency that the Congress has conceded defeat even before the start of the fight. Congress nominee Mahant Baldev Dass is a former sarpanch of Rori village. In the recent elections to the Panchayati Raj institutions, he lost the zila parishad elections.

Congress workers in the constituency are a demoralised lot. Mr Nirmal Singh of Rori said he had been a Congressman but was now supporting “Billu”, as Abhey is known in the family and the area. He said a large number of the Congressmen of the area had joined the Chautala bandwagon because prominent party leaders, Mr Ranjit Singh and Mr Jagdish Nehra, who had been representing the constituency in the past, preferred to opt out of the contest. He told TNS that in Malhari village there was a lone Congressman. Even he had come to the Chautala camp.

The two brothers have already visited 89 villages of the constituency twice. Now they are on a personal contact programme, which includes accepting invitations to have a cup of tea at the houses of new converts.

At Mr Devi Lal’s “dhaani”, near Burj Bhangu village, Ajay visits the house of an ardent Congress supporter. A photograph of the former Chief Minister, Mr Bhajan Lal, hangs on one of the walls. Ajay is offered a seat under the photograph. He declines cold drink but helps himself with roasted almonds. The head of the family not only promises the vote but also presents a purse of Rs 10,000 to the INLD MP as a token of his support. Ajay moves on to next village to net another fish. Mr Devi Lal says he has joined the INLD after remaining in the Congress for 40 years.

Senior Congress leaders like Mr Bhupinder Singh Hooda and Mr Shamsher Singh Surjewala, who visited the constituency in the past two days, apprehend that the ruling party would indulge in large-scale booth capturing and that the Election Commission had been indifferent towards the complaints lodged by the Congress with the observers.

Ridiculing the apprehensions of the Congress, Abhey says the Congress is to blame for its decline in the area. First the AICC Secretary, Ms Selja, shied at the contest during the last Lok Sabha elections. Then Mr Nehra and Mr Ranjit Singh did not contest the Rori byelection and instead fielded an unknown person. “Now it seems the entire Congress has deserted the fight midway,” he says, adding that the Congress is preparing the ground for boycotting the polling.

Abhey also ridicules the Congress allegation of misuse of official machinery by the ruling party. He says during the regimes of the Congress and the HVP, the official machinery had been rusted. “Now we have again oiled it and brought in a working order.