Party HoppersThe most popular joke in Haryana in the current election season goes as follows: Vote for lotus to send your tried and tested Congress leader to Parliament. The joke has gone viral in the state because the ruling BJP has fielded more leaders from the Congress than those from its fold. Six out of the total ten Lok Sabha candidates of the BJP in the state are former Congressmen. The party had plans to field two more former Congressmen which would have taken the tally to eight. But Ramesh Kaushik, a former Congressman turned BJP MP from Sonipat, was dropped at the last stage due to a sex scandal involving him. The other was Brijendra Singh, who quit BJP to join the Congress. Brijendra is the son of veteran Congress leader Birender Singh, who was the state’s deputy chief minister. Ranjit Singh, who has now been fielded in place of Brijendra from Hissar, was also in Congress for over fifteen years and had made failed attempts to enter the Parliament and state assembly on the ticket of the party. He was later made chairman of a state corporation by the Congress.The other five former Congress leaders who are contesting the Lok Sabha election on a BJP ticket are former state Congress president Ashok Tanwar from Sirsa, former Union minister Rao Inderjit Singh from Gurugram, Arvind Sharma from Rohtak, Naveen Jindal from Kurukshetra and Dharambir Singh from Bhiwani-Mahendragarh. All these leaders have had a long association with the Congress and joined the BJP around 2014. Dharambir has the unique distinction of joining three different parties to defeat three generations of the powerful Bansi Lal family which was part of Haryana’s famous Lal trio of Devi Lal, Bhajan Lal and Bansi Lal that ruled the state for decades. He defeated Bansi Lal in the Tosham assembly elections as a Lok Dal candidate. Then he defeated Bansi Lal’s son Surinder Singh from the same assembly constituency as a Congress candidate. In the last two Lok Sabha elections, he defeated Surinder’s daughter Shruti Chowdhary from the Bhiwani-Mahendragarh constituency by fighting on a BJP ticket.
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