 "Manohar Lal Khattar")
Long before being formally appointed Haryana’s chief minister-designate, Manohar Lal Khattar had presented before Prime Minister Narendra Modi a comprehensive multi-sectoral plan of his vision for the state and the path ahead.
Modi and Khattar go a long way back, having been friends since the mid-1990s. Khattar shares with Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Amit Shah a penchant for detailed forward planning. Party sources say the electoral success in Haryana — including parting of ways with its Lok Sabha ally, the Kuldeep Bishnoi-led Haryana Janhit Congress — had much to do with Khattar and Shah’s intensive planning.
According to people in the know, Khattar’s presentation focused on several radical reforms, including reduction in transaction costs in business. Sources say the strong builders’ lobby of Haryana is unlikely to have a field day during a Khattar-led government.
| FROM RSS PRACHARAK TO HARYANA CM |
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Born: January 1, 1954, Nindana village, Maham tehsil, Rohtak Ideological affiliation: BJP, RSS Marital status: Bachelor Profession: Agriculturist Constituency: Karnal
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After he was unanimously elected leader of the BJP Legislature Party during a meeting of the party’s 47 MLAs on Tuesday, Khattar said he would try giving Haryana a corruption-free government. “I want to assure the public that we will carry out development in the state according to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision. There will be no partiality on the development front, which the state has experienced,” he said, adding no region of the state would be ignored.
Sixty-year-old Khattar hails from a family of agriculturists. His grandfather and father were refugees from Pakistan, and settled in Nindana village in Rohtak after the country’s Partition in 1947. They initially worked as labourers before starting a small shop. Khattar was born in 1954 in Rohtak. A good student, he planned to become a doctor but gave up his ambition on realising the long years needed to study. He dabbled in business and ran a successful venture in Delhi’s Sadar Bazar before waking up to find social work and politics as his true calling during the Emergency years of 1975 to 1977. He joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh soon after, and in 1994 shifted to the BJP as the party’s organisation secretary for Haryana.
Khattar and Modi used to be inseparable during the mid-1990s. Modi was then the BJP incharge of Haryana, and Khattar his closest aide. After a four-year stint, Modi was brought to the Centre and later sent to Gujarat as chief minister, while the party continued to utilise Khattar’s abilities as an effective election manager in Jammu and Kashmir in 2002, Chhattisgarh in 2003 and several other states in later years. Modi also turned to Khattar for managing the elections in Kutch in 2002. A bachelor, Khattar currently heads the party’s All India ‘Antyodaya’ cell. He also headed the election campaign committee for Haryana during the Lok Sabha elections. The BJP won an unprecedented seven of the 10 seats in the general elections.
He was the party’s lead campaigner and election manager during the Assembly elections. In yet another similarity to Modi’s career graph, this was Khattar’s debut in electoral politics. He contested from the Karnal Assembly seat, winning by 63,773 votes. The PM had contested the first election of his political career after being made the Gujarat CM in late-2001. Modi had started his election campaign for the 2014 Haryana Assembly polls by addressing his first rally on October 4 in Karnal. As with Modi in Gujarat, Khattar, too, does not hail from a community that is numerically strong in his state of birth.
A Punjabi Hindu, his appointment as the next CM is certain to be noted by the Shiromani Akali Dal, the BJP’s ally in the neighbouring Punjab. The move could help the BJP consolidate votes among non-Sikh communities in the neighbouring state. Khattar is the first non-Jat CM of Haryana in 18 years, the first BJP CM, as also the first from his community since the state was carved out of Punjab in 1966.
