2 PM report on Phase 6: Focus on Delhi and Haryana

2 PM report on Phase 6: Focus on Delhi and Haryana

At around midnight, a dozen men had entered the Gohana government guesthouse of Sonipat district and had started beating up the two guests black and blue, using their lathis. Both the guests were nothing less than powerful ministers in the Haryana government and had actually been there on official duty. In fact, one of them was even a woman who later went on to become a powerful national leader but she had just made her debut then in the Haryana assembly. She was Sushma Swaraj and her ministerial colleague was the powerful Jan Sangh leader, Dr Mangal Sen.

The ordeal of both the ministers on that dark night of 1978 apparently lasted for a couple of hours and both had to be treated by local doctors before leaving. The men with lathis were only following the directions of their own Chief Minister, Ch. Devi Lal!

In fact, Ch. Devi Lal’s Lok Dal faction was popularly referred to as Lath Dal in Haryana and used brute force against other caste leaders of his own government from time to time to keep them in check. Different opposition parties had all come together on the Janata platform and had won a whopping 87 seats out of 90 in the 1977 post-emergency election and had formed a government with all the factions getting equal representation. The Jat community though was simply loath to share power with other castes and wanted Devi Lal to have full control of governance. Eventually, unable to take the highhandedness of the Lath Dal, all the other caste leaders came together and ousted the Devi Lal government in 1979 and anointed Bhajan Lal as the new chief minister. Then Jat anger came to the forefront and the state digressed into chaos and violence. The Jats would simply not let any of the ruling government’s ministers or MLAs enter in to their villages (sounds familiar today, doesn’t it?)