With a neck-and-neck fight with the Congress on the cards in the Assembly polls a few months down the line, the Haryana CM is meeting people throughout the day when he is at his official residence, attempting to solve their problems.
It was a knock at midnight from a group of men calling on the Chief Minister, not to draw his attention to some urgent matter but to check if he was indeed, as per his word, meeting people late into the night.
With almost three months left for the all-important Haryana Assembly elections, CM Nayab Singh Saini, singed by the BJP’s below-par performance in the Lok Sabha elections in which the party saw its tally halved, is leaving no stone unturned as he goes about ensuring that the BJP returns to power for a third straight term in the state. The CM has gone on a welfare overdrive since the parliamentary election results on June 4 and says he is meeting thousands of people every day.
Saini said his days start around 7 am and goes on till about 4 am as he meets government officials, party leaders, and the public through the night, catching a few winks of sleep. According to those close to him, his meetings from Thursday night went on till about 4 am the next morning. First, it was meeting the public and hearing their grievances and then came the meetings with BJP leaders.
“I meet nearly 6,000-7,000 people a day. As many four shifts have been scheduled to meet the people for every day if I am at the official residence,” said Saini. Recounting a recent incident he said a group of almost 10-15 people from Rohtak landed at his residence just to check whether he was actually meeting people at midnight as he had promised.
“I had made an open announcement that I would be available to meet people facing an emergency at 12 in the night too. One night, my staffers informed me at midnight that 10-15 people had come to meet me. I agreed to meet them and asked about the emergency that prompted them to visit me. They said, ‘There was no emergency. We came just to check whether you actually meet people at 12 in the night,’” said the CM, adding that most people meet him to resolve local disputes, electricity and water problems, and police inaction.
Saini said he used to attend unknown phone calls even when he was a minister in the first Manohar Lal Khattar government from 2015 to 2019. Recalling another incident, he said, “One night, at 2 am, a factory owner called me to inform me that a fire had broken out in his factory in Ambala district. I coordinated with the District Collector and the fire brigade staffers and ensured immediate response to the incident. A few years later that industrialist told me he had called me because neither the DC nor the SP was picking up his calls.”
Saini, who is the state BJP president, said sometimes calls by people who are not serious land them in trouble. “A few years ago, I was a minister in the state government. A drunken person from my native village used to call me at 2 am. I warned him that such a habit may land him in trouble if he faced actual trouble and I did not take his call. But he ignored my advice. One night, I did not take his call and the next day, I came to know that the drunken person was arrested the night before and was locked up in a police station.”
The BJP appointed Saini the CM on March 12, replacing Manohar Lal Khattar. Since becoming the CM, Saini has introduced an open-door policy at the CM residence. “I have always enjoyed meeting people and redressing their grievances. Sunvayee to jaroor honi chahiye (People should be heard). That is why so many people feel Saini unka banda hai (Saini is their person),” the CM told The Indian Express earlier.
For the BJP, the coming Assembly elections are likely to be a challenge because of the hit it took in the parliamentary polls. Though the BJP and the Congress evenly split the 10 Lok Sabha seats in the state, the Congress-led INDIA bloc managed to lead in 46 of the 90 Assembly segments. Minus former ally Jannayak Janta Party (JJP), whose support it required to form the government in 2019, the ruling party faces a stern test later this year.
In 2019, the BJP won every Assembly segment in seven Lok Sabha seats. This time the party managed to sweep the segments in just Karnal, where Khattar was the winning candidate. In comparison, the Congress swept all the Assembly seats in Rohtak and Sirsa. Since the poor results, the Saini government has made a raft of announcements, focusing its outreach on Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Scheduled Castes (SCs). From providing 50,000 jobs in the next two months and free 100-square-yard plots to every family below the poverty line to free bus travel up to 1,000 km with the Haryana Antyodaya Parivar Parivahan Yojana (HAPPY) and approval for unauthorised residential colonies along with adequate infrastructure in each, the government has made several announcements. It has also admitted to flaws in its flagship family ID scheme-Parivar Pehchan Patra while holding camps across the state to fix the grievances of the people.