Now, with all of Haryana’s 10 Lok Sabha seats gearing up to vote on May 25, Adampur’s eyes are on Bishnoi. Both he and his son have so far stayed away from Chautala’s campaign. Though Bishnoi this week declared on X that he’s sticking with the BJP as a “simple worker” and isn’t switching to the Congress, the community is in wait-and-watch mode. There’s even hope that the Congress might choose Chander Mohan, Bishnoi’s elder brother and a former deputy CM, as their candidate.
“We are waiting for a signal from Kuldeepji. If he gives a hint to support the BJP, we will immediately start working for Ranjit Singh. If somehow, the Congress gives its ticket to Chander Mohanji, we will rally behind him. In that scenario, even Kuldeepji won’t be able to stop us,” Hawa Singh said. “If none of the above two happens, you will see either a very low vote percentage at the Adampur assembly seat or many people like me may go and vote for NOTA (none of the above).”
ThePrint tried to contact Kuldeep Bishnoi via phone and messages, but his aide Mohit Sharma said the BJP leader was not speaking to media persons.
Also Read: No LS ticket, not in star campaigners’ list — Kuldeep Bishnoi on political margins after joining BJP
On-hold election season
At Adampur Mandi, where Bhajan Lal’s old shop is still kept running by his family, business was in full swing in the scorching heat of Monday afternoon, with farmers bringing tractorfuls of wheat for sale to procurement agencies. But unlike other parts of Hisar, the usual buzz of election season seemed missing and there were few campaign posters and hoardings in sight.
Subhash Godara, a member of the Bishnoi community from Adampur’s Sadalpur village had a ready explanation for the subdued mood. “We’re all waiting to see who the Congress nominates. If it gives the Hisar ticket to Chander Mohan, the entire community will be sure to support him. If we start aligning with any other candidates now, it will become difficult to change loyalties late,” he said.
Kuldeep Bishnoi, irked over being overlooked for a BJP ticket and excluded from the list of star campaigners, has refrained from participating in the campaign for BJP’s Hisar candidate Ranjit Singh Chautala, a state minister and son of the late Jat leader and former deputy PM Devi Lal.
Last Saturday, even Kuldeep’s son, BJP MLA Bhavya Bishnoi, missed Chautala’s campaign event in Adampur, despite being listed on the promotional posters. This didn’t go unnoticed. Many interpreted Chautala’s comment at the rally that no one should have the misconception of thinking they were indispensable to the party as a pointed remark directed at the Bishnois.
Later, Chautala tried to downplay this comment when ThePrint caught up with him at Garhi village in Hisar’s Hansi Assembly constituency, where he was holding a chaupal meeting. According to him, he has been in touch with Kuldeep Bishnoi over the phone.
“He told me that he has nothing against me. I hope he will soon join the campaign,” Chautala said.
Minister Chautala contested the assembly elections from Rania in Sirsa as an independent candidate in 2019 and came into the BJP’s fold earlier this year, getting his nomination from Hisar shortly thereafter. But for Kuldeep Bishnoi, who switched from Congress to BJP in 2022, it has been a less rewarding experience so far, although he was appointed as co-incharge for the BJP in the Rajasthan assembly elections in November 2023.
Back at Adampur’s Mehalsara village, resident Subhash Bishnoi said that today if the BJP nominee’s campaign is looking dull it is so only because Kuldeep Bishnoi is silent.
“The moment he joins the campaign, people will see the difference,” he said. “The BJP should have realised that its candidates are facing stiff opposition in the rural areas of Haryana, but its leaders continue to insult Bhajan Lal Ji,” he added.
This comment was a reference to a local sore point—former Haryana CM Manohar Lal Khattar implying at a gathering in Hisar that Bhajan Lal promoted corruption.
Subhash was not impressed by Khattar’s attempt to soften his remarks by claiming Bhajan Lal had expressed concerns about corruption in past conversations. “That’s hard to believe because, back in the 1980s when Bhajan Lal was CM, Khattar was nowhere in politics,” he said.
Why Bhajan Lal loyalty runs so deep
The Bhajan Lal family’s influence extends beyond the Bishnoi community and Adampur. Many attribute their loyalty to the social mobility that the patriarch provided to people in the region.
Hueashan Lal Sharma, a resident of Kohli village in Adampur assembly constituency, said people revered Bhajan Lal’s family because he didn’t treat residents as just his constituents but kept “parivarik naata” (familial ties). Whenever someone in the area died, a member of the Bhajan Lal family would make it a point to visit and offer condolences. Not just this, many people were also given government jobs.
“Not a single household of this constituency was left where two or three members were not in government jobs. Many of them have now retired. Some of them had reached the position of Class 1 officers. This has changed the socio-economic status of a whole lot of families,” Sharma said. “People who otherwise would have been still working in their fields could provide quality education to their children and settle them in good jobs in India and abroad because of the jobs Bhajan Lal provided them.”
Out of 1.67 lakh voters of Adampur constituency, Sharma estimated that Bishnois must not comprise more than 15 percent. “The other communities too have benefitted from Bhajan Lal’s family equally,” he added.
The family still has a prominent presence in the area and are building a palatial structure that will house both a shop and a residence on the site of Bhajan Lal’s old business.
Not just Adampur, their influence extends to Nalwa, Ratia, Tohana, Fatehabad, and Dabwali assembly seats.
In the Nalwa assembly seat, more than 12 villages from the old Adampur constituency were shifted following the 2007-08 delimitation. Meanwhile, the Fatehabad assembly seat, part of the Sirsa parliamentary constituency, includes Bhajan Lal’s ancestral village Mohammad Pur Rohi. Several parts of Sirsa constituency have a significant Bishnoi population, including Ratia and Tohana assembly seats of Fatehabad district and Dabwali seat of Sirsa district.
At HUDA Sector 3 in Fatehabad, Harnam Bishnoi, who retired as a senior officer from the Haryana Renewable Energy Development Authority (HREDA) some years ago, said that the community will go wherever Bhajan Lal’s descendants ask them to.
Currently, the Fatehabad assembly seat is represented by Bishnoi’s cousin, Dura Ram, who has already started his campaign efforts for BJP’s Ashok Tanwar in the Sirsa Lok Sabha seat. However, the community is closely watching how Kuldeep Bishnoi is treated within the BJP, with many claiming this will influence their support.
Also Read: ‘My father & I considered outsiders in BJP’ — Hisar MP Brijendra Singh, who quit party to join Congress
Bishnoi’s zig-zag trajectory
Kuldeep Bishnoi’s voyage of changing political parties began in 2005 when the Congress’s central leadership chose Bhupinder Singh Hooda to lead the party’s government in Haryana despite Bhajan Lal playing a key role in it winning 67 out of 90 seats.
While Bishnoi’s brother, Chander Mohan, became the deputy CM in Hooda’s government, Bishnoi, then an MP from Bhiwani, remained disgruntled. This culminated in the formation of the Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC-BL) by Bishnoi and his father in December 2007, although they were able to bring only two other Congress MLAs, Dharam Pal Malik (Gohana) and Rakesh Kamboj (Indri) to their side. Subsequently, only Bhajan Lal won the by-elections in 2008, while Bishnoi was disqualified in September 2008 for not contesting.
The following year, Bhajan Lal secured the Hisar Lok Sabha seat, though Bishnoi’s new party won only six seats in the state assembly, with most of his MLAs defecting back to Congress, leaving him as its lone legislator.
After Bhajan Lal’s death in 2011, Bishnoi successfully contested the by-election for the Hisar Lok Sabha seat, while his wife Renuka was elected from Adampur in the 2012 assembly elections. Around this time, the HJC and BJP entered an alliance contested in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections together. Bishnoi’s party contested only two seats—Hisar and Sirsa—in alliance with the BJP— and lost both. Later that year, the two parties snapped ties ahead of the assembly elections, in which only Bishnoi and his wife Renuka won seats from the HJC.
Following a spell in the political hinterlands, Bishnoi merged his party with the Congress after he met with Rahul Gandhi in April 2016.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Bishnoi’s son Bhavya Bishnoi was fielded by the Congress from Hisar but he lost the seat to Brijendra Singh, then of the BJP.
In the assembly polls that ensued in October that year, Bishnoi won his family’s Adampur assembly seat, but his relations with the Congress became strained in April 2022 when the party picked Hooda’s aide Udai Bhan as its state president over him.
In the Rajya Sabha elections in June that year, Bishnoi voted for Kartikeya Sharma, a BJP-supported independent candidate, citing his faith in Modi. He finally resigned as MLA and joined the BJP on 4 August 2022. In the ensuing byelection for the Adampur Assembly seat, Bishnoi’s son Bhavya Bishnoi emerged victorious. But with the Hisar ticket going to Chautala, it seems Bishnoi is back to square one.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)