Jat conundrum: Jagdeep Dhankar's exit bares BJP's struggle with community

India Today

7 days ago

When the BJP elevated Jagdeep Dhankhar to vice-presidency in 2022, it was pitched as a masterstroke. A farmer's son from Kithana village in Rajasthan, Dhankhar symbolised the party's breakthrough moment with the Jat heartland spanning Haryana, Rajasthan, western Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. His appointment was meant to signal respect, representation and long-term stake. He was, after all, the first Jat to occupy this top constitutional post.Barely three years later, Dhankhar's abrupt removal and stories of his friction with the Narendra Modi government have flipped that narrative. The leaders are not going by the merit of the case, but the emotions running with it. In Jat chaupals and khap meetings, it is not being read as a dry institutional tussle in Delhi but as a familiar story: that the BJP allegedly hands out chairs but not power, titles but not trust. In many quarters, it has only deepened the community's longstanding distrust.advertisementFor a regime thought by many to wield the axe unsentimentally—nudging out Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governors Raghuram Rajan and Urjit Patel, seeing off election commissioner Ashok Lavasa, abruptly shunting out finance secretary Subhash Chandra Garg, swapping cabinet ministers without explanation, even replacing chief ministers before or after hard-fought poll victories—the Dhankhar episode still lands differently.His elevation as vice-president was sold internally as a symbolic gesture to the Jat community, an anointment of a face with weight across Rajasthan, Haryana and western UP. Dhankhar leaned into that identity, consciously projecting his Jat tag. That the BJP chose to cut him down so openly has sharpened the perception that the party's embrace is transactional.
Jagdeep Dhankhar may not have been able to prove himself as a Jat leader. His biggest claim to fame is that because of his understanding of the Constitution, the BJP picked him to tackle Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, as the state's governor, and later entrusted him the responsibility of running Rajya Sabha, as its chairperson.But some are trying to generate sympathy, emotions and further anger against the BJP. Dhankhar's resignation sparked sharp reactions from across the Jat spectrum. Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) chief Abhay Singh Chautala called it a 'conspiracy'; Dushyant Chautala and his Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) termed it a 'national loss'.Jat khaps joined in: Yudhbir Singh Dhankhar warned of Jat alienation; Tek Ram Kandela dismissed Jagdeep Dhankhar's health claim for the resignation as an 'excuse'. Even Ranjit Chautala, who stood with the BJP until the last Haryana polls, said the community must introspect: 'The BJP gave our people key posts. First Satyapal Malik embarrassed the party, and Dhankhar did no less.'Farmer leader Rakesh Tikait added a sardonic warning to young Jat politicians: 'Those under 50 aligning with this party will end up like Dushyant Chautala; those above 50 will be sidelined like Satyapal Malik or Jagdeep Dhankhar.'For the BJP, the blow cuts deeper because it sits atop a decade of calculated outreach. The Modi years have seen a sustained attempt to stitch a Jat strategy, knowing the community can swing nearly 30 Lok Sabha seats and dominates assembly politics across north India. The effort has been systematic: Subhash Barala and O.P. Dhankar as Haryana BJP chiefs to counter the 'non-Jat' charge; Satish Poonia in Rajasthan; Chaudhary Bhupendra Singh in UP; Sunil Jakhar in Punjab.advertisementJagdeep Dhankhar's rise was accompanied by gubernatorial placements: Satyapal Malik in Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir and Meghalaya; Acharya Devvrat in Gujarat; Gurmit Singh in Uttarakhand. The optics were clear—the BJP was investing in Jat leadership at every level.The BJP also went leader-hunting. From the Congress came Birender Singh, a towering Jat figure, rewarded with a Union ministry and a Rajya Sabha seat. His wife Premlata was fielded in the Haryana assembly election and son Brijendra Singh launched as a Lok Sabha MP—a textbook case of Jat cultivation. Then, just before the next Lok Sabha polls, father and son both went back to the Congress. Brijendra contested assembly elections and lost, leaving the BJP with nothing to show for years of careful investment.Punjab offered the same lesson. The BJP tried to breach Jat Sikh agrarian politics by importing Balbir Sidhu and Gurpreet Kangar and anointing Sunil Jakhar as state chief. But without rural organisational depth or cultural bridge into peasant networks, the party remained an outsider.In Rajasthan, the alliance with Hanuman Beniwal's Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (RLP) offered a flash of Jat consolidation that dissolved almost instantly. Rahul Kaswan's defection to the Congress before the 2024 general elections underlined the lack of a self-sustaining second-rung Jat leadership in the state.advertisementWestern UP tells the same story in a different accent. The 2024 alliance with Jayant Chaudhary's Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) was electorally expedient but underscored the BJP's dependence on external anchors. The memory of the 2020-21 farm laws protests still hangs over Muzaffarnagar and Shamli. Satyapal Malik, once the BJP's own Jat face, became its fiercest internal critic during the agitation. Welfare schemes and OBC consolidation have helped the BJP claw back some ground, but its Jat cadre remains wafer thin.Haryana is the most instructive case. The BJP has run the state for a decade, yet its core base comprises urban Punjabi clusters, the Bania community and non-dominant OBCs. The 2019 alliance with Dushyant Chautala's JJP was supposed to blend that with Jat rural strength and create a durable coalition. The farm laws protests blew it apart. Dushyant's tightrope act between khap anger and coalition loyalty symbolised the BJP's structural problem: in the absence of an organic Jat base, it is forced to lean on alliances that crumble the moment community trust is tested.advertisementFor all the BJP's attempts at Jat inclusion, the numbers reveal the pattern: the party leans overwhelmingly on turncoats and alliance imports rather than cultivating an indigenous leadership. Of the three Jat ministers in the current Modi cabinet, two—Jayant Chaudhary and Ravneet Singh Bittu—crossed over from rival camps just before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.In Haryana, one of the Nayab Singh Saini cabinet's two Jat faces, Shruti Choudhry, is a recent Congress defector. Rajasthan's Bhajan Lal Sharma government counts four Jat ministers, half with Congress lineage. Even in UP, the Yogi Adityanath cabinet's three Jat ministers are organisational loyalists without mass resonance. The tally across Union and state cabinets underlines the structural gap: a party ruling the Hindi heartland for a decade still has to rent rather than raise its Jat faces.Why has the BJP failed to crack the Jat puzzle? The answer lies as much in culture as in arithmetic. Jat politics is agrarian, rooted in land, khap panchayats and a collective sense of izzat. The BJP's sociological DNA in these states is urban, trader and non-dominant OBC. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) shakha network—the bridge elsewhere—never built deep roots in Jat villages. Without that ideological embedding or grassroots cadre, the party's strategy defaults to parachuting leaders and stitching alliances. That creates visibility, not loyalty. In Jat politics, respect isn't conferred in Delhi; it is earned in the chaupal.advertisementThat is why symbolic elevation often boomerangs. Dhankhar's vice-presidency was meant as the ultimate gesture of respect. His very public jousts with the government are being read as proof of a larger pattern: the BJP offers titles without autonomy, seats without voice. Birender Singh and Brijendra Singh's exit carried the same moral. In Punjab, the Sidhu-Kangar-Jakhar experiment failed not for lack of faces but lack of roots.Layered onto this is the political economy gap. The BJP's north Indian narrative is built on welfare delivery, urban expansion and non-farm growth. Jat politics is tethered to land value, credit and the moral economy of agriculture. The farm laws protests were not just a policy backlash; they were an identity revolt. Even now, as the BJP offers MSP guarantees and rural sops, the memory of that rupture lingers.For the BJP, this isn't a marginal problem. Sustaining north Indian dominance depends on turning gestures into genuine roots. The current model—symbolic posts, imported leaders, transactional pacts—has delivered intermittent wins but no structural consolidation. Breaking that cycle requires a shift: building a real cadre in Jat belts, embedding in khap networks, crafting an agrarian economic pitch beyond welfare doles and, above all, understanding that in Jat politics, izzat is cultivated, not conferred.The Dhankhar episode has crystallised that lesson more sharply than any electoral defeat. What was meant as inclusion has become a parable on the limits of symbolic politics. In the khaps of Rajasthan, the sugarcane fields of western UP and the chaupals of Haryana, the story is already being retold in a way no Delhi spin can recast. The BJP has spent a decade trying to engineer a Jat breakthrough. What it has built instead is a fragile edifice of borrowed faces and paper alliances, always one defection or protest away from collapse. Until it learns that posts don't buy allegiance and power without izzat is no power at all, the Jat conundrum will remain the party's most persistent struggle.Subscribe to India Today Magazine- Ends