Members of the Jat community are once again on the streets demanding reservation in government jobs in Haryana. The situation has gone out of hand at some places including Rohtak on the Delhi border. The Jats are a 100% agrarian community and enjoy enormous economic and political clout. In the last few decades they have got better education and feel that they should also get quota benefits under Other Backward Classes (OBC) category.
In Haryana, the Jat vote percentage is over 27% and no political party can come to power without their support. Undeniably Jats are the real king-makers of Haryana. Out of a total 90 Assembly seats in Haryana, Jats are in a big majority in over 35-40 seats. Till BJP entered the state, in the bipolar politics of Haryana, both the Congreess and INLD were headed by the Jats. Even though one of their chief ministers, Bhajan Lal, was not a Jat, the Congress was by and large a Jat party in the state. Currently, both the Congress and INLD are headed by Jats. The former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda is leading the Congress and the INLD is led by jailed former chief minister Om Prakash Chautala’s son Abhay Singh Chautala.
According to official records, seven out of a total ten chief ministers of Haryana have been Jats. For the first time, the BJP came to power in Haryana in the October 2014 Assembly polls defeating both Congress and INLD. The Modi wave had helped the BJP capture Haryana.
The Jats were hoping that the BJP would appoint a Jat MLA as its chief minister. But, the BJP high command in Delhi led by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the party chief Amit Shah nominated an inexperienced, first time MLA Manohar Lal Khattar as the chief minister angering the Jats. Khattar was rewarded for his hardcore RSS background. Khattar, a Punjabi, is still considered an outsider in Haryana and the Jats are uncomfortable with him. The Jat lobby feels that a Jat should be made the chief minister and Khattar should be removed. The violent Jat agitation has come as a huge shock to Khattar, whose one-and-a-half years of rule has been very lacklustre.
According to a report in “The Indian Express” the last five days of escalating tension across the state has pushed the ruling BJP government on to the back foot. A first time MLA who made it straight to the post of chief minister, Khattar, has had to change his decision three times in the last five days. A committee comprising IAS officers headed by Chief Secretary DS Dhesi was constituted to analyse the whole issue. The committee was originally asked to submit its report by March 31.
As the Jats intensified their agitation, Khattar advanced the deadline to March 24. Now he has asked the committee to submit its report before March 17 – the day when Haryana Vidhan Sabha’s budget session is scheduled to begin. Earlier, Khattar’s round of talks with the Jat leaders failed. The government’s offer to include Jats and four other castes, Jat Sikh, Ror, Tyagi and Bishnoi under a new category of Economically Backward Persons (also called Economically Backward Class) failed to impress the Jats. Khattar has announced that the government shall increase the quota under EBP from existing 10 per cent to 20 per cent. Also, he proposed an increase in the annual income ceiling from Rs 2.5 lakh to Rs 6 lakh. However, the Jats refused to accept this and so the agitation continues.
The same report quotes legal experts as saying that the Jats' demand is untenable since the Supreme Court on March 17, 2015, had already quashed the Congress-led UPA government’s decision to provide reservation to them under OBC category in the central government. The apex court refused to admit Jats as a backward community. Consequently, the reservation introduced for Jats in Haryana and eight other states including Gujarat, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Bharatpur and Dholpur districts of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand were set aside.
Both Congress and INLD are now using this opportunity to settle scores with the BJP. Even within the BJP, most of the MLAs and ministers are unhappy with Khattar’s style of functioning and are unlikely to stand by him in his hour of crisis.
One has to wait and see how a non-Jat chief minister like Khattar is going to handle the crisis. Political analysts feel that Khattar may not be able to come out of this unscathed.
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