Gurugram: Among its list of eight candidates announced by the Congress for Haryana Thursday, the candidature of Satpal Brahmachari from the Sonipat parliamentary seat is generating interests due to his return to politics in the home state after spending two decades in active politics in Uttarakhand.
Brahmachari, a Brahmin, has been pitted against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate and Rai Assembly MLA Mohan Lal Badoli from the same community.
The Congress is touting Brahmachari’s nomination from Sonipat as a masterstroke, which the party leaders claim will not only help the party win this seat but will also benefit the neighbouring seats.
Brahmachari told ThePrint that he was grateful to the Congress leadership for giving him a chance to contest from Sonipat and would “definitely win this seat for the party”.
Born at Gangoli village in Jind district under the Sonipat Lok Sabha seat, Brahmachari became mayor of the Haridwar Municipal Corporation in 2003.
He contested the Uttarakhand elections from Haridwar in 2012 and 2022 on the Congress ticket and lost to BJP stalwart Madan Kaushik on both occasions. According to the Election Commission data, in 2022, Kaushik got 53,147 votes while Brahmachari tallied 37,910 votes. In 2012, Kaushik secured 42,297 votes and Brahmachari managed 33,677 votes.
Later, he was appointed president of the Haridwar City Congress in March 2023.
The Congress is contesting nine of the 10 Lok Sabha seats in Haryana. According to the seat-sharing arrangement, the party has given Kurukshetra to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which has fielded Sushil Gupta. The Congress has kept candidature to the Gurgaon seat on hold, where actor Raj Babbar is an aspirant.
Besides Brahmachari, the Congress has fielded Mahendra Pratap Singh from Faridabad, Rao Dan Singh from Bhiwani-Mahindragarh, Kumari Selja from Sirsa, Varun Choudhary from Ambala, youth leader Divyanshu Budhiraja from Karnal, Deepender Singh Hooda from Rohtak, and Jai Prakash from Hisar.
According to Parminder Singh Dhull, an ex-MLA from Julana that comes under the Sonipat seat, Brahmachari might have been active in Uttarakhand all these years but he hails from Jind and enjoys a good rapport among people because he heads dharamshalas in Haridwar, Gangoli and Pandu Pandara, where thousands enjoy his hospitality.
“I don’t know much about the other assembly segments of Sonipat, but there is hardly any village in Jind, Julana, Safidon and Gohana assembly segments from where people have not been to his dharamshalas during their pilgrimages,” Dhull told ThePrint.
The Sonipat Lok Sabha seat comprises nine assembly segments. Of these, Jind, Safidon, and Julana fall under Jind district, while Gohana, Sonipat, Rai, Baroda, Gannaur and Kharkhoda come Sonipat district. Notably, Brahmachari hails from Jind district, while his rival Badoli comes from Sonipat district.
Dhull added that it was the first time that any major political party has given its ticket from Sonipat to a person from Jind, and hence, Brahmachari is likely to get a huge response from the three seats of the Jind district.
Notably, despite his tenure in Uttarakhand, Brahmachari on his Facebook page has a picture with former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda as the cover image, signalling his political allegiance.
Brahmachari’s association with Hooda goes back two decades when the Congress leader faced a life-threatening situation in Uttarakhand in 2003. Hooda narrowly survived when his vehicle was engulfed by the surging waters of the Pili River, while his brother, Rajinder Hooda, was swept away.
Yoginder Gupta, a former journalist accompanying Hooda at the time, recounted to ThePrint that they clung to trees throughout the night to avoid being swept away. At dawn, Brahmachari, who was then serving as Haridwar mayor, led a rescue team to their aid.
Also Read: Once arrested for blocking Khattar’s convoy, Congress’s young Divyanshu Budhiraja now his poll rival
Brahmachari and his ashrams
Brahmachari’s 2022 poll affidavit declared assets worth Rs 47 lakh, free of liabilities. He holds a graduate (Shastri) degree from Sampurnanand Sanskrit University in Varanasi, and has no criminal record. In his affidavit, under the father’s name section, he identifies himself as a shishya (disciple) of Radha Krishna Brahmachari.
According to Brahmachari’s assistant Ritesh Sharma, the Congress candidate is mahant (head priest) of two ashrams in Haridwar— Radhakrishna Ashram and Thanaram Ashram — as well as the Waktanand Ashram in Pandu Pindara in Jind, and Bada Mandir at his ancestral village in Gangoli.
“Thousands of people from Haryana visit these ashrams and stay there during their pilgrimage, and Brahmachariji has a personal rapport with many of them,” he added.
Former MLA Dhull also said that thousands of people from all communities from the Jat-dominated regions of Jind, Sonipat, Rohtak and Hisar areas visit Pandu Pindara where Brahmachari has an ashram.
According to the Haryana tourism department’s website, Pindara, also known as Pandu Pindara, is a sacred site situated approximately 6.5 km from Jind, on the Jind-Gohana route.
The place is steeped in mythology, with tales recounting how the Pandavas conducted the Pind Daan ceremony — a rite to honour the deceased — at Pindara during a Somvati Amavasya (the lunar phase of the new moon that falls on Monday), to pay homage to relatives who were killed in the Mahabharata war.
Rakesh Malik, a professor of law at the Central University of Haryana at Mahendragarh and a native of Pandu Pindara village, told ThePrint that Pandu Pindara becomes a bustling hub during Amavasya, the new moon phase, attracting people from all over the state and beyond caste divisions to its monthly fair.
The Congress poll managers believe that Brahmachari’s nomination will not only give him a head start because of his long association with the local people who have been visiting and staying at his ashrams, but also counter the religious narrative of the BJP because Brahmachari himself is a socio-religious leader.
(Edited by Richa Mishra)
Also Read: Haryana Youth Congress chief to take on Khattar in Karnal, Brijendra Singh loses out on ticket