Dushyant Chautala | Sanjay Ahlawat
His day begins well before 6am, and most of it is spent in creating awareness about his new party—Jannayak Janta Party (JJP). Hisar MP Dushyant Chautala’s daily meetings with those in charge of the many cells in the JJP last at least five hours. The youngest parliamentarian in Indian history, the 31-year-old could very well be the youngest founder of a political party in India.
Last November, Dushyant and his 27-year-old brother Digvijay, former president of the student wing of the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), were expelled from the INLD for indiscipline. A month earlier, they were served a show cause notice as their supporters had heckled their uncle Abhay Chautala at a rally in Gohana to mark their great-grandfather Chaudhary Devi Lal’s birth anniversary. Dushyant refused to accept the notice. Abhay asked for an apology; Dushyant formed a new party. Abhay dismissed it as a “children’s party”.
It was a manifestation of the power struggle within the Chautala clan—the only other political family, apart from the Gandhis, to have fourth-generation leaders. While Devi Lal was twice chief minister of Haryana and deputy prime minister, three of his four sons were MLAs at different times. Dushyant’s grandfather Om Prakash Chautala, INLD president, was chief minister of Haryana five times, albeit some of them were interrupted. Dushyant’s father, Ajay, was MP from Bhiwani as well as a Rajya Sabha member. Ajay was also MLA from Dabwali, a seat now represented by his wife, Naina. Both Om Prakash and Ajay are in jail after being convicted in the teacher recruitment scam.
Dushyant’s uncles, Ranjit Singh and the late Pratap Singh, were also MLAs. It was only his uncle, the late Jagdish, who could keep politics at bay. But his sons, Anirudh and Aditya, joined the BJP at the height of the Modi wave in 2014. They were welcomed into the saffron party by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who had begun her political innings in Haryana and was a young minister in Devi Lal’s first cabinet in 1977.
It is this political lineage that Dushyant and Digvijay dissociated themselves from when they formed the JJP. Dushyant announced the name of his new party at one of the biggest rallies in Jind on December 10. The ‘Jannayak’ in the party name is a smart move. In Haryana, there is only one Jannayak—Devi Lal.
Also, the JJP was not even a month old when Digvijay contested the Jind assembly byelection. He came a close second to the BJP’s Krishan Lal Middha, trouncing the INLD candidate Umed Singh and the Congress’s Randeep Surjewala. Also, by the third week of March, the INLD was no longer the principal opposition party as it lost four of its MLAs to the JJP and one to the BJP. Abhay, therefore, had to resign as leader of opposition in the Haryana Assembly.
Dushyant, meanwhile, attended two Parliament sessions after his INLD membership was suspended. He is not forthcoming about his relationship with his grandfather, who reportedly supported Abhay in the fight. Om Prakash’s photo is conspicuously missing from the JJP posters. All Dushyant emphatically states is that there will be no going back into the INLD fold because “they are a traditional party, and we belong to the future”.
DUSHYANT CHAUTALA, 31
EDUCATION
BSc (business administration and management), California State University
POLITICAL LINKS
Great-grandfather Chaudhary Devi Lal was deputy prime minister and twice Haryana chief minister; grandfather Om Prakash Chautala was chief minister five times; father, Ajay, was member of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha; and mother, Naina, is Dabwali MLA