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Ecostani | Jayant Chaudhary hopes that the NDA will help his party — and the BJP, too
The RLD has sensed a shift of Jat voters over to the BJP, and the saffron party would like Jayant to campaign in Jat-dominated areas. Both hope it’s a win-win
Since Jayant Chaudhary, president of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), a party with influence among Jats in western Uttar Pradesh, announced that he would be part of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) giving a severe blow to INDIA bloc, the Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav has not spoken a word against him. Jayant had also not given any reason for leaving the SP-led alliance in UP saying that the Bharat Ratna for his grandfather and former prime minister Chaudhary Charan Singh has left him with “no choice” but to join the NDA.
Born in 1978, Jayant graduated from Delhi University and did his Master's in Accounting and Finance from the London School of Economics. He made his political debut in 2009 when he won the Lok Sabha election from Mathura.
The Muslim-Jat vote bank initiated by grandfather Chaudhary Charan Singh and nurtured by father Ajit Singh, was eroded in 2013 in the wake of the Muzaffarnagar riots that saw about 50,000 Muslims displaced when Akhilesh Yadav was CM of Uttar Pradesh. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the RLD lost all eight Lok Sabha seats it contested, including Baghpat (Ajit Singh’s loss) and Mathura (Jayant’s loss). The BJP, however, won all eight seats.
Jayant approached the Samajwadi Party for an alliance before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The election was significant on two counts as Akhilesh had brought in two parties, Bahujan Samaj Party and RLD, into an alliance. The two parties were Mulayam Singh’s arch-rivals in state and national politics. However, this grand alliance (Congress was part of it too) was unable to stop the BJP, which won 62 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in UP. The alliance got 15 seats.
Jayant, who took over the party’s reins after his ailing father died in 2021, stuck with SP all along. But, the Bharat Ratna for Chaudhary Charan Singh wasn’t the only reason Jayant joined the BJP. In the past decade, the RLD’s vote base had eroded and the Jat community appeared to be firmly behind the BJP. The RLD had failed to win even a single seat in two Lok Sabha polls and in the 2022 assembly elections, the party won only eight of the 33 seats it contested. However, in the by-poll held that same year, Jayanat’s party was able to win from the Khatauli assembly election, which was the epicentre of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar communal riots. This was the first win for the opposition from the riot-hit area in years. This provided a boost to the RLD-SP alliance in the region, as they thought that farmers in western UP were shifting towards the alliance — something that was bolstered also by the farmer unrest.
However, with the consecration of the Ram temple by prime minister Narendra Modi, the BJP in Uttar Pradesh has received a clear electoral boost. No doubt, Jayant was feeling squeezed and uncertain. “He sensed that the Jat would vote for BJP and he may return empty-handed in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. So, when the offer came to join the NDA, he accepted it with a condition of providing a route to leave the SP alliance,” said a farmer leader from western UP, who has been associated with Jayant’s party for a long time.
A senior BJP leader aware of the developments said that with the RLD with them, their worries in western UP are over. “Muslims alone cannot impact poll results in western UP. They matter only with the Jat or another community. So, Jayant joining the NDA alliance will ensure a clean sweep for the BJP,” the leader said.
With the alliance, Jayanat has tried to provide some much-needed oxygen to his party. The RLD president knew well that he would not get more than three seats to contest in the over-crowded NDA in UP even though SP was offering it seven seats. “Jayant knows that whatever seats he wins, he will with the NDA as compared to the alliance with SP,” said the farm leader quoted above.
On its part, getting Jayant will help BJP impact Jat voters in Haryana and Rajasthan, where the party has faced Jat resentment in previous polls. In the 2019 Haryana assembly poll, six months after the Lok Sabha elections were held that year, the BJP performed poorly in the Jat-dominated districts. In the December 2023 Rajasthan assembly polls, the Congress was almost at par with the BJP in Jat-dominated districts. The BJP would like Jayant to campaign for the alliance in these areas in Haryana and Rajasthan, even though the party’s experiment to get its ally in Haryana, the Jannayak Janata Party (JJP) led by Dushyant Chautala, to field candidates in the Jat dominated districts of Rajasthan came a cropper.
With the farmers’ protest starting again in Punjab, Haryana, western UP and parts of Rajasthan, it will be interesting to see whether Jayant joining the NDA will help the BJP gain the support of Jat voters for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls or not.
Chetan Chauhan, National Affairs Editor and a journalist for over two decades has written extensively on the social sector and politics with a special focus on the environment and political economy. He analyses the most important environmental story in the country this week
ABOUT THE AUTHORChetan ChauhanChetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More
