Ashok Tanwar was in Safidon in Haryana’s Jind district on Thursday afternoon, canvassing for BJP candidate Ram Kumar Gautam on the last day of campaign for the Haryana Assembly polls. By 3 pm, the BJP leader arrived in Mahendragarh, about 150 km away, to join the Congress at the end of Rahul Gandhi’s rally.
“Today is exactly five years since I left the Congress. Even after quitting the party, I kept in touch with several leaders of the party. Whatever happened in the past is history. Let bygones be bygones. I and the entire Congress shall now be working towards building Haryana into the number one state,” Tanwar who has changed parties thrice since quitting the Congress in 2019 told The Indian Express.
Congress sources close to Tanwar said “he was in touch with the senior Congress leadership, particularly Gandhi, and the state unit did not know about it”. “He had direct contact with Rahul Gandhi and the decision to join was firmed up on Wednesday,” said a Congress insider. Along with Gandhi and All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary for organisation K C Venugopal, senior state leaders, including Tanwar’s former rival and state Leader of the Opposition Bhupinder Singh Hooda, were also present on the stage when the BJP leader was reinducted in the party.
Ram Kumar Gautam who switched from the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) to the BJP last month said he was surprised by Tanwar’s switch. “I am surprised that he (Tanwar) has joined the Congress. I did not know this as I was busy campaigning on the last day. How could he do it? He spoke well at the event in Safidon. He appealed to the people of my constituency to vote for me. It was a big rally held by me in Safidon. Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath also addressed the rally but by then Tanwar had left”.
On October 1, Tanwar campaigned in Ujhana village in the Narwana (SC-reserved) seat along with CM Nayab Singh Saini and visited the homes of several BJP workers. The day before, Tanwar campaigned for the BJP’s Krishan Kumar Bedi in Narwana. He received Saini at the helipad and then both of them addressed a Jan Ashirwad rally. At all these places, Tanwar sought votes for the BJP, praised the Saini administration, hit out at the Congress, and asked people to vote for the BJP.
Tanwar’s return is likely to help the Congress combat the BJP’s frequent accusations of it being an “anti-Dalit” party following reports of discord between Hooda and the party’s Sirsa MP Kumari Selja who like Tanwar is also from the Dalit community. Tanwar who lost the parliamentary election to Selja by around three lakh votes was seen intermittently campaigning for the BJP’s nominees in Sirsa. Two days ago, he addressed a Jan Ashirwad rally in Ujhana in the Narwana Assembly constituency and then posted photos of his visit to the home of an elderly person along with Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini.
AAP to TMC to BJP
Tanwar who studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi was once considered one of the Congress’s rising young stars. After heading the National Students’ Union of India, the students’ wing of the Congress, starting in 2003, Tanwar served as the Indian Youth Congress president for five years from 2005 onwards.
His wife Avantika, the sister of senior Congress leader Ajay Maken, is also seen as someone close to the Gandhi family. Her parents Geetanjali and Lalit Maken were gunned down by Sikh extremists in Delhi in 1985.
In the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, the Congress fielded Tanwar from Sirsa, which he won by a big margin. In February 2014, the Congress appointed him as the Haryana Congress president. However, he kept having run-ins with Hooda. For several years, the latter’s attempts to remove him were unsuccessful due to Tanwar’s proximity to the Gandhi family. However, in September 2019, a month before the Assembly polls, then Congress president Sonia Gandhi finally replaced Tanwar with Selja to avert a split in the state unit. An upset Tanwar reacted by staging a protest in front of Sonia Gandhi’s New Delhi residence along with his supporters.
In the Assembly polls that followed, Tanwar openly supported many JJP candidates. Barely a fortnight before the polls, he resigned from the Congress. His exit is believed to have dented the Congress’s prospects as the party’s opponents projected it as “an injustice to an emerging young Dalit politician”. However, it was a setback for Tanwar too, who found himself relegated to the margins of state politics after being at its centre for years.
In February 2021, Tanwar formed a socio-political outfit, the Apna Bharat Morcha, but, months later, joined the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in the presence of its chairperson and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. In April 2022, Tanwar quit the TMC, which failed to generate any buzz in Haryana, and joined the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
At the time, Tanwar’s supporters were happy, viewing it as a “turning point” in his political career. They took heart from the AAP’s sweep in the Assembly elections in neighbouring Punjab just months earlier. This January, Tanwar resigned from the AAP’s election campaign committee and joined the BJP in the presence of then CM Manohar Lal Khattar at BJP headquarters in New Delhi.
