On Tuesday, 8th October the Bhartiya Janta Party returned to the Haryana assembly with a resounding win. With a clear majority of 48 seats it achieved a historic feat of a hattrick government repeat in the state. The results came as a shock to many candidates, one of whom is Gurnam Singh Chaduni. The Farmer leader who was one of the faces leading the protests against the farm laws, got a rude shock as he too fell by the wayside with a dismal performance.
Gurnam Singh is the Haryana chief of the Bharatiya Kisan Union — one of the leading farmer unions that gave a call for the agitation against the three farm laws that were later revoked. Chaduni who is also the founder of the Sanyukt Sangharsh Party, but his performance on the electoral day turned out to be a shocker. Far from winning the seat, Chaduni was even outstripped by the candidates of the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) and Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) both of whom ended up receiving more votes than him.
This is, however, not the first electoral disappointment for Chaduni and his compatriots. In 2019, Chaduni had contested the Haryana State Legislative assembly elections from the Ladwa (Vidhan Sabha constituency). His party the Sanyukt Sangarsh Party contested on 10 seats in 2022 in the Punjab Legislative Assembly elections but failed to leave any impact on voters.
This time Chaduni was contesting the Haryana assembly elections from the Pehowa seat under his home district Kurukshetra. But, he could muster only 1,170 votes and lost his deposit. The contest was won by Mandeep Chatha of the Congress, who polled a total of 64,548 votes against his main opponent Jai Bhagwan Sharma of the BJP.
In 2020, after the passing of the three farm laws by the Parliament of India there was a huge protest against it. Gurnam Singh Chaduni was one of the ‘leaders’ of the Samyukta Kisan Morcha. He was also one of the select ‘leaders’ intent on converting the farmers protest into an electoral movement. Much like Rakesh Tikait, Gurnam Chaduni has also spent most of his time projecting himself as the ‘true leader’ of the farmers.
The results will also come as a relief to the populace in and around the region, as the Delhi Haryana Singhu border is still barricaded with an extensive blockade for the past seven months, causing great inconvenience to the public. Had Chaduni and his compatriots emerged victorious in Haryana they would have used the opportunity to further choke the highways in and out of the capital. This kind of insensitive mindset is perhaps one of the major reasons the public has given its decisive verdict against Gurnam Chaduni and his party.