Jat Reservations: Khattar Fails The Test

The Haryana CM’s ineptitude and a sharp caste divide contribute to the Jat stir in the state spinning out of control.

- Asit Jolly

Nineteen people dead at last count; hundreds of vehicles —private cars, police jeeps, cargo-laden trucks, even standing railway rakes—burnt down; scores of public and private buildings, including ministers’ homes, still smoking after deliberate arson; fear and an impossible-to-ignore caste divide across the state. This surely cannot be the ‘Happening Haryana’ that rookie chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar had in mind when he, some say, pompously chose the catchy tagline to sell the state as India’s premier investment destination four months ago.

Now, just a week short of the grand Happening Haryana investor summit he promised in Gurgaon on March 7-8, not only is the event in peril, but Khattar’s 16-month-old government seems to have come unhinged and in need of handholding from New Delhi. A former RSS pracharak who, despite having no experience of government or the legislature, was appointed CM in October 2014, thanks essentially to his saffron credentials and proximity to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Khattar has been clearly unprepared and completely unsure on how to deal with the first real crisis that confronted his government.

And it is far from being over. The ferocious quota agitation—by far the bloodiest since Haryana’s dominant community of Jats first raised the demand for inclusion among backward castes after the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations in 1993—is unlikely to ebb and could well bear the potential to derail the Bharatiya Janata Party’s only ever independent government in Haryana. Most people, including many of his cabinet colleagues, are blaming Khattar’s “ineptitude, dithering indecision and inexplicable reluctance to consult fellow ministers” for the unprecedented situation the state and its people find themselves in.