Haryana’s reservation law and BJP’s ‘India First’ are at loggerheads

As the BJP and its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi prepared to take the reins of power at the Centre, the party stated in that document that its guiding principle will be ‘ek Bharat, shreshtha Bharat’.

In its 2019 Lok Sabha polls manifesto, the BJP said it spent the previous five years working to achieve the ideal of ‘ek Bharat, shreshtha Bharat’.

It counted the roll out of ‘one nation, one tax’ in the form of the goods and services tax (GST) as one of its achievements. The BJP renewed its pledge to work towards achieving a single agriculture market, which it says is also being partly achieved through the recently-passed three farm laws.

The BJP and Modi have repeatedly spoken of the need for holding of simultaneous Lok Sabha and assembly polls, and towards that have a policy of a ‘one nation, one election’.

It is nearly seven years since this BJP wave set in; and, call it the seven-year itch, or a desperate attempt to hold on to power in the state, but the BJP’s coalition government in Haryana has found it more expedient to ignore the party’s promises that it will work towards shaping a more unified India. For example, its campaign for the abolition of Article 370, which granted special status to the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, argued among other things against the constitutional provision as it barred outsiders from buying land there.

When we come to Haryana, the promise to reserve two-thirds of the state’s private sector jobs was part of the poll promise of BJP’s coalition partner, the Dushyant Chautala-led Jannayak Janta Party (JJP).

The BJP has succumbed to not merely the coalition pressures of running a government in Haryana, which has witnessed growing disaffection in recent months, but appears to be going against its avowed project of ‘India First’.

Here is an excerpt from the BJP’s 2014 manifesto on the subject.

‘India First simply means nurturing and protecting all the elements, which India is made of. It does not exclude anyone or anything — it only includes everything and everyone, which India is made of.

It is complete India; without exclusion, without exception. It also means that whatever is in the interest of India will be in the interest of all the elements that India is made up of, including its citizens,’ the manifesto read.

The manifesto went on to state that ‘For the BJP, the only philosophy and religion of a government should be India First,’ the manifesto said.

In recent years, ruling parties in Telangana and Jharkhand have also proposed similar reservations in private sector jobs, but Haryana is the first to push for it to be legislated.

It isn’t a coincidence that Chautala has piloted the seemingly populist legislation at a time when he is under pressure to quit the state government on the issue of its support to the contentious farm laws.

The legislation has triggered fears of not only hurting productivity in the state, but also give free run to inspector raj. The law could threaten the prosperity of Haryana’s industrial and business cities such as Faridabad and Gurugram that have benefited from being neighbours of the national capital.