‘Congress could have made clean sweep with better ticket distribution’
Geetanjali Gayatri
Chandigarh, June 6
It takes a lot of nerve to be a woman who stands her ground in Haryana’s male-dominated society and more so in a riven party as the state unit of the Congress, but Sirsa’s newest Member of Parliament, Kumari Selja, has taken everything in her stride to come out right on top.
Selja won Sirsa with the second highest margin of 2,68,497 votes in Haryana, and is back in the Lok Sabha after more than 10 years. She lost the last two elections and prior served in the Rajya Sabha from 2014 to 2020.
UNFAIR ASSESSMENT
We lost Bhiwani-Mahendergarh and were crawling in Sonepat and Gurgaon where we fielded candidates whose names we had never heard of. Had general secretary incharge Deepak Banwaria given a fair assessment to the party high command, we could have done better. — Kumari Selja
Still, Selja’s name was the only one to have come from the Congress party top brass in Delhi. It is said that former Congress president Sonia Gandhi has a soft corner for her. Of the nine seats the Congress contested in Haryana — except for the Kurukshetra seat which was contested by the Congress’ Aam Aadmi Party ally — all the remaining names were recommended by the powerful former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda.
Apart from Senior Hooda’s son, Deepender Hooda, who won from Rohtak, the influence of the Hoodas is believed to extend to the four other seats won by the party — Sonipat, Hisar and Ambala. It is common knowledge in Haryana that the Hoodas and Kumari Selja belong to different camps in the Congress.
“There have always been factions in the party. I am not going to be shy of admitting that,” she tells The Tribune, as she readies to take oath as a Lok sabha MP for the fifth time — four terms in the Lok sabha and one term as Rajya Sabha MP. Daughter of Dalbir Singh, a former union minister who contested from Sirsa and the former state unit chief, Selja understands the struggle and the constant tug of war that goes on in politics well.
I learnt my values and principles from him and improvised my learnings to suit the situations I was faced with. Sirsa has always been close to my heart since I contested my first election—the by-election of 1988 after my father, a sitting MP, passed away. I was still studying and I took my first step into politics at late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s instance. He wanted me to contest the by-election which I lost. There has been no looking back since then,” she says.
She stops short of commenting about the party factions coming together for the Assembly elections, that are expected to take place in October. But she isn’t afraid of speaking her mind about the ticket-distribution for this election that was said to be managed by Hooda.
“We could have made a clean sweep with better ticket-distribution. We lost Bhiwani-Mahendergarh and we were crawling in Sonepat and Gurgaon where we fielded candidates whose names we had never heard of. The general secretary in charge, Deepak Banwaria, did not give a fair assessment to the party high command or we could have done better,” she says, adding that he was “less than impartial”.
Selja underlines that it was she who suggested MLA Varun Chaudhry’s name from Ambala, a constituency she has represented in the past. “I gave his name, I urged him to contest and I went to campaign for him in Ambala in the middle of my own campaign,” she says, adding that the party’s interest comes first and she suggested the candidate who was best suited unlike the selection of candidates from some other seats.
This election, the party’s surveys showed the people wanted me to contest from Sirsa and the margin of my win did end up reflecting they chose me. I didn’t go into the election with the margin in mind but it was during the campaign that I got a sense of the way the public opened its heart to me,” she said.
“I was keen on contesting the Vidhan Sabha elections but had maintained that if the party high command wants me to contest the parliamentary elections, I would abide by their decision and I did,” Selja, the Dalit face of the Congress who has also served as Union cabinet minister during the UPA regime, quips.
The newly elected MP was also critical that Deepak Banwaria wrote a “public” letter to say that everyone should campaign for the party. While Banwaria was also referring to the third faction in the Haryana Congress — that of former Union minister Birender Singh who had left the Congress in the 2019 election to join the BJP for which his son, Brijendra, got a ticket to fight from Hisar, and who returned to the Congress on the eve of this poll, even though Brijendra did not get a ticket from the Congress — Selja wonders if there was any need for Banwaria to go public with his advice.
“Where was the need to go public with the letter? That is what all leaders should do and that is what every leader was doing,” she said.
As it turned out, Birender Singh hardly went into Hooda territory, nor did Hoodas return the favour. But Birender Singh, says Selja, campaigned for her, as did Rajya Sabha MP Randeep Singh Surjewala and MLA Kiran Choudhry.
The state unit chief, Udai Bhan, did not visit her constituency even once.
On whether the Congress can come to power in the assembly elections, Selja says the issues that come into play in the state elections are very different from those in the general elections.
“Though Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the failures of the central government we’re among the top issues, the state situation, too, had a bearing on the parliamentary polls. The change of the Chief Minister, the confusion about who was in the driver’s seat, the break-up of the BJP and the JJP among others also impacted the outcome. However, there are three months still to go for the assembly polls but one thing is evident—the people don’t want the BJP because its failures are too glaring. The party, too, will have to introspect and strike a balance while taking everyone along when it comes to the assembly polls,” she signs off.
