“When the observers announced Saini’s name, it was like the dropping of a bombshell for me. I am a senior member of the party and was a senior minister. He (Khattar) could have shared with me his plans. I was the home minister of the state and I was so ill-informed that I didn’t even know that the chief minister of my state was going to be changed in the next few minutes. If such is the position of a home minister, then why does someone need to be it?” Vij told ThePrint.
The senior BJP leader had left the legislature party meeting midway and travelled in a private vehicle to reach his Ambala residence. He had then skipped both Saini’s swearing-in ceremony on 12 March and the Cabinet expansion on 19 March.
Asked whether Khattar or his successor Saini asked him to join the new cabinet, Vij replied in the negative. He further said that he received Saini’s call late in the afternoon on Tuesday inviting him to “witness” the cabinet expansion.
When ThePrint drew Vij’s attention towards statements of Khattar and Saini saying they would convince him to join the Cabinet, the former minister replied that only the two leaders could offer an answer to this question.
He had earlier told the media in response to a question that joining the Saini cabinet was a “hypothetical question”.
On Thursday morning, Vij posted Urdu poet Allama Iqbal’s couplet on ‘X’, formerly Twitter, which loosely translated into English means: “There is something that our personality does not fade away. The world has been our enemy for centuries.”
कुछ बात है कि हस्ती, मिटती नहीं हमारी।
सदियों रहा है दुश्मन, दौर-ए-ज़माँ हमारा।।— ANIL VIJ MINISTER HARYANA ( मोदी का परिवार ) (@anilvijminister) March 21, 2024
Also Read: Sexual assault accused Sandeep Singh left out in 1st expansion of Haryana CM Saini’s cabinet
‘Could have learnt lesson from Dhankar’s exit’
Hemant Atri, a political analyst from Haryana, believes that Vij is now the ‘L.K. Advani of Haryana’, and his role is at best restricted to a ‘Marg Darshak Mandal’, though it was unlikely that the new CM would seek his advice.
Atri said that though Saini was in the top seat, Khattar remains the de facto chief minister.
“Khattar was CM till 12 March. He is a super CM now. Look at the officers in the CMO. Not a single senior officer has been changed. As in Ramayana, Bharat looked after the affairs of Ayodhya with the ‘Khadau’ (wooden slippers) of his elder brother Ram on the throne, Saini was running the state’s affairs on behalf of Khattar and on his will,” he added.
Through the cabinet expansion, he said, Khattar not only eliminated Vij who always was like a thorn in his flesh, but also tamed Rao Inderjit Singh by inducting the Gurugram MP’s adversary Abhe Singh Yadav into the Cabinet.
Rao Inderjit Singh, too, told the media on Monday that he was never consulted during the recent events, neither when Khattar resigned and Saini took over, nor at the time of selection of ministers.
Atri added that the manner in which BJP state president O.P. Dhankar was replaced by Saini proved that senior BJP leaders who didn’t fit in Khattar’s scheme of things were dispensed with. Khattar has proved himself to be more powerful now, he asserted.
Another analyst Pawan Kumar Bansal said that the BJP was a disciplined party and the way Vij walked out of the BJP Legislature Party on 12 March was never tolerated in the BJP of the present day.
That Vij’s stock has fallen was amply clear when Union Home Minister Amit Shah in October 2022 snubbed him at the two-day Chintan Shivir (camp) organised by the Ministry of Home Affairs at Surajkund.
As Vij kept embarrassing Khattar with tantrums — like the tussle over the functioning of CID in 2020 and skipping work at the health department for more than a month in 2023 — the latter had shown him the door in a subtle manner when the opportunity came, Bansal said.
Bansal further said that no one in Haryana had any doubt that the real strings of power in the state were in the hands of Khattar even after Saini became the CM.
“Haryana has a long history of having dummy chief ministers. When Indira Gandhi inducted the then-Haryana CM Bansi Lal as the defence minister in 1975, he installed Banarsi Das Gupta in his place. After the Janata Party came to power in 1977 and set up the Shah Commission to probe the Emergency excesses, Gupta said on record that he was just a dummy CM and the real power vested in (Bansi Lal’s son) Surender Singh,” he said
“When (Om Prakash) Chautala again appointed him as CM in May 1990 after the Meham mayhem, Gupta had no hesitation in saying that he was a dummy for Chautala. Later, when the media asked Hukam Singh whether he too was a dummy CM, Singh replied that he was less than a dummy.”
The new CM is unlikely to prove different from what Banarsi Das Gupta and Hukam Singh were for Bansi Lal and Chautala, he added.
“Under such conditions, Khattar will never like a senior person like Vij who has his ways on matters of governance to be a part of Nayab Saini’s cabinet.”
Saini would have to prove through his actions that he was the real CM and not a dummy one, the political analyst said.
Another political analyst Satish Tyagi highlighted that Vij’s rivalry with Khattar was nothing new because when the latter was named as CM in 2014, the Ambala Ambala Cantonment MLA too aspired to become the same chair.
“Saini has always been a trustworthy lieutenant for Khattar during the past 10 years… With PM Modi’s blessings, Khattar can run the government as well as the party at his will. Vij could have learnt a lesson from Dhankar’s exit as party president in October. It is because of his ways that he finds himself in this position,” Tyagi added.
He said that all senior BJP leaders like Rambilas Sharma, Captain Abhimanyu, and O.P. Dhankar had lost their elections in 2019. “Vij was the only senior leader left. But now, he too has been shown the door.”
A source close to Vij told ThePrint that the former minister was not happy with the way he was being treated within the government.
“Every time the minister took up an issue for a public cause, he was ignored and also humiliated and the CID was taken away from his ambit (in 2020), and he was not consulted for transfers of officers in the police department,” the source said.
Given his influential status of being the second most powerful BJP minister of the Khattar cabinet in the not-so-distant past, Vij’s downslide has been steep in a little over a week period.
Hours before Saini expanded his week-old cabinet Tuesday, Vij had met Haryana Assembly Speaker Gian Chand Gupta in Chandigarh. “I met the Speaker and I have requested him to nominate me to a few sub-committees of the assembly. Once I am on a sub-committee, I will have meetings every week. So, I will keep frequenting Chandigarh,” he had told the media.
At that time, the five-time BJP MLA had played down the media’s query about not being inducted in the cabinet and not being invited for the oath taking ceremony. “I have already said so many times that I am an Ananya Bhakt (unparalleled devotee) of the BJP. I will be even more dedicated than I was working when I was a minister,” he said.
As for now, Vij is still considered to be popular at his home turf Ambala Cantonment, a seat which sent him to the Vidhan Sabha in 1990, 1996, 2009, 2014, and 2019.
A day after the cabinet expansion, Vij shared a YouTube video that shows him sitting with his supporters in Ambala Cantonment. Vij is all smiles, as the supporters clap and sing a popular Bollywood song ‘Tere Jaisa Yaar Kahan, Kahan Aisa Yaarana, Yaad Karegi Duniyan, Tera Mera Afsaana.’ (Where we will find a friend like you, where we will find such friendship, the world will remember our legend)
(Edited by Tony Rai)
Also Read: On-the-spot suspensions & (sometimes misplaced) outbursts — why Anil Vij is called Haryana’s ‘Gabbar’