Former Haryana CM Bhajan Lal passes away at 81

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Shreyas Menon

04 June, 2011

Widely recognised as a last hope for non-Jats in Haryana, former Chief Minister and Union Minister Bhajan Lal passed away in his home district Hisar after suffering a major cardiac arrest. He was 81.

A BEACON of hope for non-Jats in Haryana, Bhajan Lal, 81, died of a massive heart attack on Friday at around 5 pm. As per medical personnel, Lal suffered a major attack on Friday afternoon and was rushed to the nearby hospital in Hisar district of Haryana where he suffered another one. While he was being admitted in the hospital, his family members were making arrangements to shift him to Gurgaon.

The former Union Minister and three-time Haryana Chief Minister had a long and varied political career. Largely a Congress man, he had a fall out with the Congress High Command in 2007 and went onto form his own party Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC), of whose he was the alma mater and an MP.

His first tryst as the Chief Minister of Haryana started out in a dramatic manner where he walked out of the Congress party with 37 MLAs in tow. His second tenure as the chief minister was from 1991 to 1996, and earned him the title of saviour of non-Jats of Haryana. Lal had also served as the Union Minister looking after the agriculture and the environment portfolio under the then Rajiv Gandhi government.

The rift with the Congress started when during the 2005 election, the Congress party decided to hand over the Chief Ministerial baton to the Jat leader, Bhupinder Singh Hooda. The Congress largely working on a no profit-no loss basis made his son Chander Mohan the deputy Chief Minister, which resulted in Lal’s younger son Kuldeep Bishnoi to form his own party Haryana Janhit Congress-BL. Bishnoi was later expelled from the Congress party for indulging in anti-party activities against the Congress.