Haryana CM Saini maybe retained after steering party to big victory

Chandigarh, Oct 9
After a historic hat-trick of victories, Haryana caretaker Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini, under whose leadership the party fought the high-octane electoral battle and overcome a 10-year anti-incumbency, may be retained as the CM.

CM Saini on Wednesday landed in Delhi and met Prime Minister Narendra Modi at his residence. The CM will also be meeting BJP’s top leaders in the national capital.

State unit BJP President Mohan Lal Badoli accompanied Saini, they are likely to meet Union Home Minister Amit Shah, besides the party’s national President and J.P. Nadda to finalise the date of the swearing-in ceremony on Dussehra that falls on October 12, a senior party leader told IANS.

The BJP won a landslide majority by winning 48 seats in a House of 90. The Congress was the second largest party with 37 seats, while the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) got only two seats. Independent candidates got three seats whereas Dushyant Chautala's Jannayak Janata Party (JJP) and Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) drew a blank.

The BJP Legislature Party is likely to meet on Thursday here to elect its leader who will be the state’s new Chief Minister, most probably Saini, 54, a non-Jat but Other Backward Classes (OBC) leader. Saini had replaced BJP veteran Manohar Lal Khattar as the Chief Minister in March, just two months before the Lok Sabha elections.

Caretaker Chief Minister Saini won the Ladwa Assembly seat by 16,054 votes, defeating his nearest rival and Congress candidate Mewa Singh.

CM Saini was brought in March to counter the anti-incumbency wave against Khattar for his nine-and-a-half-year helm. In his 56 days of governance, Saini claimed to have done so much development that Congress leader Bhupinder Hooda did in 10 years as the Chief Minister. “In 56 days, I have taken 126 historic decisions for Haryana’s development,” CM Saini said in his election campaigns.

A confidant of Khattar, Saini entered politics almost 30 years ago. He was elected as an MLA from Naraingarh in the 2014 Assembly polls and inducted into the Cabinet in 2016.

Saini was keen to re-enter the poll fray from Karnal, the seat he won in the June bypoll when he replaced Khattar as the Chief Minister. However, the BJP leadership considered Ladwa, which came into existence in 2007, the safest seat for Saini as the party polled 47.14 per cent of the votes in the June parliamentary polls.

On September 15, BJP senior-most leader and five-time legislator Anil Vij asserted that he would stake a claim for the chief minister’s post if the party returned to power in the Assembly polls. Rebutting his claims spontaneously, the party’s state in-charge, Dharmendra Pradhan, said the party would achieve a hat-trick of wins under Saini’s leadership and he’s the BJP’s chief ministerial face.