HARYANA CONGRESS IN TURMOIL: CROSS-VOTING SCANDAL EXPOSES DEEP FAULT LINES AFTER RAJYA SABHA VOTE
Four MLAs named for betrayal, acting state president quits, disgruntled legislator protests outside party office — all within 48 hours of the March 16 ballot.-
CHANDIGARH, March 18, 2026 — What should have been a routine Rajya Sabha election for Haryana Congress — a party with 37 MLAs and a winning quota of just 31 — turned into a night of chaos, near-defeat, and open rebellion that has exposed the party’s fractured state ahead of what promises to be a bruising political season.
Voting for two Rajya Sabha seats from Haryana took place on March 16, but results were not declared until around 1:10 AM the following day — nearly eight hours after counting was due to begin — as both the BJP and Congress raised objections over the validity of each other’s ballots. When the dust finally settled, five ballots had been cancelled: four belonging to Congress MLAs and one to the BJP. Congress nominee Karamvir Singh Boudh, a Dalit candidate, crossed the winning line with 28 votes. BJP-backed independent Satish Nandal missed out by a mere 0.67 of a vote.
Congress had won — technically. But the margin told a story of betrayal.
FOUR NAMES, ONE RESIGNATION
By Wednesday morning, the party stopped beating around the bush. At a press conference in New Delhi, Haryana Congress in-charge B.K. Hariprasad publicly named four MLAs as the cross-voters: Shalley Chaudhary (Naraingarh), Mohammad Ilyas (Punahana), Mohammad Israil (Hathin), and Renubala (Sadhaura). Show-cause notices are being issued to all four, and formal disciplinary proceedings have been initiated.
Hours before the names were put on record, Ram Kishan Gujjar — one of three working presidents of the Haryana Pradesh Congress Committee — submitted his resignation to party chief Mallikarjun Kharge. The political subtext was immediately clear: Gujjar’s wife is Shalley Chaudhary, the Naraingarh MLA now publicly named as a cross-voter. The family’s ties run deeper still — Chaudhary’s younger daughter is married to a nephew of Union Minister of State Krishan Pal Gurjar of the BJP.
Congress MLA Geeta Bhukkal, who had accompanied Chaudhary during the party’s corralling exercise in Himachal Pradesh — where MLAs were kept in hotels to prevent poaching by the BJP — did not hide her bitterness. “She was with me during our visit to Himachal Pradesh… she was humming ‘radhey radhey’ all along. However, she did disloyalty with her party by voting for the rival,” Bhukkal said.
A PROTEST OUTSIDE THE PARTY OFFICE
The public recriminations did not stop there. Gokul Setia, the Congress MLA from Sirsa, staged a protest outside the HPCC office in Chandigarh on Wednesday, demanding that the party high command disclose all cross-voting names publicly rather than handling the matter quietly through internal notices. Setia, who has previously complained of feeling “ignored and isolated” within the party, denied his own name was linked to the cross-voting and called the social media allegations against him “baseless.”
His protest — a sitting MLA picketing his own party’s state headquarters — illustrated just how publicly the party’s internal wounds had been laid bare.
HOODA’S TIGHT-LIPPED FURY
Leader of the Opposition Bhupinder Singh Hooda — who had kept his MLAs at his own residence before the election and then moved them to Himachal Pradesh for three days — stopped short of naming the alleged cross-voters himself, but left no doubt about his anger. “The MLAs did not betray the party or me, but the people who elected them,” he said. “Everyone knows who they are. Such individuals will be taught a lesson not only by the party but also by the people of their respective constituencies.”
Hooda also alleged that the BJP had “misused government machinery” and that four valid Congress votes had been arbitrarily invalidated by the Returning Officer despite being accepted multiple times earlier in the counting process. Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini dismissed the allegations as “misleading and irresponsible.”
A HISTORY OF SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS
This is not the first time Haryana Congress has sabotaged itself at the Rajya Sabha. In 2016, fourteen Congress MLAs had their votes declared invalid in a single election. In 2022, MLA Kuldeep Bishnoi — now in the BJP — cross-voted to hand victory to BJP-backed Kartikeya Sharma over official Congress candidate Ajay Maken, even though Congress had the numbers to win. The pattern points to a party where factional rivalries — centred primarily on the Hooda camp versus rival groupings — periodically erupt with decisive consequences at moments of legislative arithmetic.
This time, Congress escaped with its seat intact. But with a working president gone, four MLAs facing expulsion proceedings, one MLA protesting on the street, and its winning margin barely above zero, the party heads into the next political cycle visibly wounded — and with unresolved questions about who, exactly, controls its 37-member legislative group.
