Dera, Junaid lynching issues kept Haryana on the edge in 2017

Haryana remained in news, mostly for wrong reasons, in 2017 - be it the Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh episode, the lynching of a 17-year-old boy on a train or the killing of a seven-year-old in his school.
However, there was jubilation when Manushi Chhillar was crowned Miss World and 29-year-old police sub-inspector Anita Kundu became the first Indian woman to scale Mount Everest from the China side.
Improvement in gender ratio also brought cheers to the state, which celebrated its golden jubilee year. The gender ratio reached 937 compared to 830 in 2011.
Congress and principal opposition INLD kept up the attack on the Manohar Lal Khattar government over its alleged failure on issues related to law and order, power, farmers, employees, and governance.

The year saw a re-run of the trail of death and destruction which Haryana witnessed in 2016 in the violence that followed the Jat quota stir, but this time there was mayhem after Dera Sacha Sauda sect chief Ram Rahim was convicted in August for raping two woman disciples.
The widespread violence and arson, mainly in Panchkula and Sirsa, left 41 people dead and scores injured.

The Dera chief is now lodged in a jail in Rohtak, serving a 20-year sentence.
A three-day long mammoth sanitisation of the Dera premises in Sirsa was conducted in September overseen by a court commissioner. Most of the jailed sect chief's aides including Honeypreet Insaan, who remained on the run after his conviction, were arrested as Haryana Police registered 173 FIRs with nearly 1,000 Dera followers named as accused and booked on various charges.

The lynching of Junaid Khan in June shocked the entire nation. Junaid, who boarded the Mathura-bound train from Delhi, was allegedly stabbed to death when he, along with his brothers and cousins, was returning home to Khandawali village after shopping for Eid.
His body was later dumped near Asaoti village in Faridabad district.
The matter reached the Punjab and Haryana High Court which has stayed a trial court's proceedings in the case. A division bench of the court also issued notice to the Haryana government and the CBI on a plea of Junaid's family seeking a probe by the central agency into the matter.

In a shocking incident, class II student Pradhuman Thaukur was found with his throat slit in his school's washroom in Gurgaon on September 8.
School bus conductor Ashok Kumar was arrested by the Haryana Police but got bail recently after the case was transferred to the CBI. The agency apprehended a class 11 student in connection with the killing.
In December, another incident rocked the state and made national headlines. A seven-year-old girl died of dengue at Fortis Hospital in Gurgaon which billed the victim's family Rs 16 lakh for the treatment. A Haryana government panel indicted the hospital in the case saying there were "several irregularities".

State Health Minister Anil Vij termed it as "not a death, but a murder".
May and December saw two brutal cases of rape and murder involving a 23-year-old woman from Sonipat and a six-year-old girl from Uklana in Hisar.
The Opposition was up in arms against the government on the law and order front and other issues with former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda and leaders like Randeep Singh Surjewala, Kiran Chowdhury, Ashok Tanwar and Abhay Singh Chautala leading the charge.
Hooda and Surjewala also addressed series of rallies raising issues of various sections including farmers. The INLD vociferously raised the Sutlej Yamuna Link canal issue and blamed the Khattar government for failing to safeguard the interests of the state.

The opposition parties also targeted the Khattar government for scrapping the Dadupur Nalvi canal project.
Hooda often maintained that the Khattar government was only doing "event management without any concrete work on ground".
Amid raging concern over rising pollution levels, apparently caused by stubble burning, Delhi and Haryana held discussions on a range of issues and dwelt on possible measures to prevent the re-occurrence of smog next winter.
During February-March, the Jats remained on warpath and sat on dharnas over their main demand of quota though their stir remained peaceful this year. In the spiral of violence which broke out last year, over 30 people had died, several were were injured and large-scale damage was caused to both public and private property at many places.

In August, Haryana BJP president Subhash Barala's son Vikas was accused of stalking daughter of a senior IAS officer from the state and this incident too remained in news for days.
On the positive side, Haryana became a kerosene-free state, rural Haryana was declared Open Defecation Free in June and the BJP government also made the Public Distribution System online, which helped in keeping a tab on corruption and leakage of food-grains.
Sixty-three-year-old Khattar maintained he wanted to provide a corruption-free, transparent and accountable government and to put in his own words also to "fill many potholes" left by the previous government and ensure equitable development.

In May, BJP president Amit Shah paid a visit to Chandigarh and ruled out the possibility of change of guard in Haryana putting all speculation to rest which suggested that Khattar, a former RSS pracharak, would be replaced after there were reports on "dissident" activities by at least 16 MLAs.