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Bordering national capital Delhi, Haryana is among the richest states in India, with a per capita income ( ₹2.96 lakh in 2022-23) about 1.7 times the national average. While the numbers would suggest people in the state are better off than their compatriots elsewhere, the locals do not quite see things that way.

Kulana, for instance, is another world compared to the prosperous and urbanized parts of the state, far from the luxury-car outlets along Grand Trunk Road and gated high-rises in urban Gurgaon. An estimated 65% of the population lives in villages, and this rustic backyard is today setting the agenda for the elections.

Unlike in earlier years, when the assembly poll was a multi-cornered contest, the polls this year are a straight fight between the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has ruled Haryana for two back-to-back terms, and the opposition Indian National Congress (INC), which has ruled the state off and on since its founding. It will be the first head-to-head fight between the two national parties since the 2024 general election.

Unlike in earlier years, when the assembly poll was a multi-cornered contest, the polls this year are a straight fight between the incumbent BJP and the opposition Indian National Congress

It is an election that will be decided by issues such as farm woes, frustration with the army’s recruitment policy, lack of job avenues, and the anguish of the state’s vaunted wrestlers. Most of all it will be decided by which way Haryana’s castes choose to lean.

Farm distress dominates

Any discussion on the Haryana election usually begins with the problems farmers in the state face. While the agriculture sector contributes just about 16% to the state’s gross domestic product, farm issues and farmer angst have dominated its political landscape in recent years.

Political parties have been going all out to pacify and woo farmers. With good reason; the state has been a hotbed of farmer protests in recent years. It started in end-2020, when a mass agitation began after the Centre introduced a set of farm laws to reform the agriculture markets. The protests were led by farmers from neighbouring Punjab and Haryana, who picketed Delhi’s doorstep for more than a year, until the three laws were repealed in 2021.

A fresh round of agitations started this February, with farmers demanding legal status for the government’s minimum support price (MSP) regime. MSP is the price at which the Centre purchases crops, mostly rice and wheat. The farmers want this to be a legal obligation for 24 non-perishable crops. When the farmers decided to march on Delhi again, a face-off ensued, with the Haryana police firing teargas shells and rubber bullets on the protesters.

“We are going to plant mustard (a winter oilseed) now, but fertilizers are not available. The state government procures only a limited quantity of crops like mustard and bajra (at MSP) but payments are often delayed by months,” complained Amit Kumar, a farmer from Kulana. The village, unlike more fertile areas such as Karnal and Ambala, grows less rice and more of other crops, including bajra (pearl millet), as there isn’t enough water available for irrigation.

Hawa Singh, a 73-year-old farmer from Sonipat, complained that rising expenses on farming have pushed him to reduce spending on household items. “The Centre is giving ₹6,000 every year (under the PM-Kisan scheme) to farmers, but I end up paying many times more, because of the 18% GST (goods and services tax) on pesticides, and steep prices of diesel (used to run farm machinery),” he said.

However, state BJP leaders appear confident about winning the farm vote and a third term. “Farmer leaders may be unhappy but real farmers are satisfied with BJP’s performance. The state purchased 14 crops at MSP and it is paying farmers ₹1,000 per acre for not burning paddy stubble (which worsens air pollution during the winter months in the National Capital Region). Congress is fuelling protests for electoral benefits,” said Surjit Kumar Jayni, BJP in-charge of Fatehabad assembly seat.

To be sure, not all farmers are in step with the protests. For instance, a large number of them grow vegetables to supply Delhi’s markets. They depend less on state support and more on market-determined prices as an MSP has not been announced for perishable crops. “We suffered a lot during the farmer agitation of 2020-2021 as roads were blocked and vegetables could not be transported to the Azadpur mandi (in Delhi),” said Dharmendra, a 46-year-old farmer from Dipalpur village in Sonipat, Haryana.

In a bid to win over the farmers, the Congress has promised to provide a legal guarantee for MSP. But the BJP has questioned this; addressing farmers at a rally earlier this month, Prime Minister and BJP leader Narendra Modi said that the Congress has not done so in states where it is in power (Karnataka, Telangana and Himachal Pradesh) and is making a false promise to farmers in Haryana. Modi also asserted that the Centre has removed the minimum export price on premium Basmati rice, which will help growers from the state earn more (the crop will be harvested beginning October).

Job and wrestler angst

The lack of decent jobs is another cause of angst, particularly among the landless. “Four of my children are graduates but none has a proper job,” said Shiv Kumar, a non-teaching staff member at a local private school in Hisar, and resident of a Valmiki mohalla (a settlement of families belonging to scheduled castes) next to Kulana. “It’s a struggle to manage daily expenses with my meagre earnings,” adds Kumar, who supplements a monthly pay of ₹5,000 with casual wage work.

The Congress has been raising the issue of unemployment, tying it with the new army recruitment scheme. “Thousands of youngsters from Haryana are illegally migrating to the USA, risking their lives, because they do not have jobs here. Families are selling land to send their children abroad… because they do not have the option of a secure army job anymore,” Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said at an election rally in Hisar, Haryana.

The Congress has not provided MSP in states where it is in power and is making a false promise to farmers in Haryana.
-Narendra Modi

The BJP’s Jayni countered this by saying that the state government had created 150,000 jobs during its term, in a clean and transparent manner.

In comparison with some states, Haryana certainly seems to be performing better. The unemployment rate among graduates in the state is at 6.6%, about half the national average, as per the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) for 2023-24.

A protest by female wrestlers has also become an emotive issue in rural Haryana. Wrestlers from the state have won multiple Olympic medals. Last January, Sakshi Malik (Olympic bronze medalist in 2016) and Vinesh Phogat led a protest in Delhi alleging sexual harassment of women wrestlers by former head of the wrestling federation and former BJP parliamentarian Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh. The ‘daughters of the state’ being dragged on the streets of the national capital by the police touched a raw nerve.

Phogat, who attained celebrity status after assuring herself of at least a silver medal at the Paris Olympics in August only to be disqualified for being overweight by 100 gm, is contesting the elections on a Congress ticket from Julana assembly seat.

“Our sisters and daughters were dragged along the streets of Delhi. Anyone who protests, be it farmers or women wrestlers, is termed anti-national. This anger will be reflected on polling day,” said former wrestler Bajrang Punia, who is currently the chairman of farmer’s wing of the Congress party. He won a bronze medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and happens to be Vinesh’s brother-in-law.

The caste factor

Politics in Haryana has always been dominated by caste. Jats, an agrarian upper caste, who comprise about a quarter of the state’s population, traditionally align with the Congress. Other Backward Castes or OBCs account for about 30% and the BJP has banked heavily on their support. Dalits (Scheduled Castes) make up another 20% of the electorate. The saffron party is hopeful of winning a third term by again riding on a consolidation of non-Jat votes.

In the 2019 state elections, the BJP won 40 out of 90 seats with a vote share of 36.5%. It formed the government in alliance with the Jananayak Janata Party (JJP), which had won ten seats. This time around, the JJP, which got 15% of the vote and won 10 seats in the 2019 polls, is facing the wrath of the Jats for supporting the BJP. Party chief Dushyant Chautala has said he made a mistake by continuing as the deputy chief minister during the farmers’ agitation in 2020/21. Indeed, amid the clash between the BJP and Congress, other parties, including the AAP, INLD, and BSP, seem to have become a sideshow in this election.

In the general elections held earlier this year, the BJP’s vote share dropped by 12 percentage points from the 2019 general elections to 46%, while the Congress saw its vote share rise by 15 percentage points to 44%. As a result, the BJP lost five of the state’s ten Lok Sabha seats to the Congress.

In March, just a month before the Lok Sabha polls, and with six months remaining for the state elections, the BJP replaced chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar, who had helmed the state for nine years, with Nayab Singh Saini, in a bid to counter anti-incumbency. Khattar belongs to the Khatri caste, a minority Punjabi upper caste community, and was Haryana’s first Punjabi chief minister. Saini, who belongs to the OBC community, is the BJP’s answer to the dominant Jats.

A reading of the BJP manifesto for the state elections shows it is going all out to woo every section of the electorate. It has promised to procure 24 crops for which MSP is announced, a monthly cash transfer of ₹2,100 to women, a ₹10 lakh health insurance scheme, a guaranteed government job to Agniveers (after their four-year stint in the Army) and creating 200,000 government jobs for the youth.

The Congress, too, has promised a monthly cash transfer to women over 18 years of age, cooking gas at ₹500 per cylinder, ₹6,000 pension for elderly and widows, a caste census, restoration of the old pension scheme for government employees, and a legal guarantee on MSP for farmers. In addition, it has promised to provide ₹25 lakh health insurance and government jobs to families who lost a member during the farmer agitation.

While both parties seem to be offering similar sops, it is the state’s caste dynamics that are likely to determine the outcome of the election. On that front, the Congress could find itself on the backfoot with the Dalit vote.

Caste arithmetic is a big factor. The Congress is banking on a consolidation of Jat and Dalit votes, while the BJP is wooing OBCs. Both parties have promised multiple welfare benefits.

A shadow fight is taking place between Bhupinder Hooda, the Congress’s tallest Jat leader and former state chief minister, and Kumari Selja, the party’s Dalit face in Haryana, who is a former central minister and currently a member of Parliament from the Sirsa constituency. In the runup to the state elections, Selja has been noticeably absent from campaigning after being sidelined by Hooda and not being given much of a say in the party’s choice of candidates.

The BJP is banking on that rift, with Modi launching a tirade against Congress at his election rally in Sonipat on 25 September. “The Dalits of Haryana are seeing the drama happening within Congress. If Congress comes back to power the infighting within the party will destroy Haryana,” Modi warned.

Citing the Hansi assembly seat in Hisar as an example of how caste equations could play out, Yoginder Yogi, a local Congress leader said, “Of the 200,000 voters in Hansi, 48,000 are Jats. Whether the Congress will win this seat depends on how the Dalits and OBCs (about 120,000 together) vote. In the 2024 general elections, there was a consolidation of Dalit votes in favour of Congress. But the current internal dynamics of the party could hurt that Jat-Dalit alliance.”

Brewing discontent

The age limit for recruitment in the Indian army was reduced from 23 years to 21 years when the Agnipath scheme was launched in 2022. This seems to be a major grouse among young aspirants. In Sherpura village of Sirsa district, Kulwant Kumar missed his last shot at joining the army after he failed to qualify this year. “I have not thought of what to do next, maybe tend to cattle like my friends do,” said Kumar, 21, son of a small farmer, who will vote for the first time in these elections.

The lack of jobs and a 2022 change in the Indian Army’s recruitment policy to a short-service tenure of four years—known as the Agnipath Scheme—have demotivated the youth, say Congress leaders. “Joining the Army used to be a hope and a mark of financial security for youth from poorer families. You could see hundreds of them running on the streets every morning (preparing for the recruitment physical). Now, these dejected youth are getting into drugs and petty crime,” said Congress leader Punia.

According to Sandeep Sinwar, a farmer and activist from Sirsa, more than 50 youth from the village used to prepare for recruitment in the Army until a few years ago. “That is no longer an option now. We have been actively organizing village-level meetings to dissuade youngsters from falling for drugs, and getting into petty crime,” Sinwar said.

Will this discontent in rural Haryana outdo the support for BJP in urban sections? It certainly appears that way, say two political observers Mint spoke to. “The best case scenario for the BJP would be to win at least 35 seats by maintaining its tally in the urban and industrial belts of south Haryana (Gurgaon, Faridabad, Bhiwani),” said Rahul Verma, political scientist and fellow at Centre for Policy Research, Delhi.

“The BJP had everything going in its favour in 2019. Now, there is a desire for change. Still it would hope that factors like visible Jat dominance and infighting within Congress will help its cause,” said Verma. “Last time, it was a division of Jat votes between Congress and JJP that helped the BJP to form the government. But this time a division in Jat votes looks unlikely.”

Last time, it was a division of Jat votes between Congress and JJP that helped BJP to form the government.
-Rahul Verma

 

Yogendra Yadav, political activist and a former psephologist, who is a native of Rewari in Haryana, also believes the Congress will do well. “Large parts of what we call urban Haryana—towns like Karnal or Rohtak—are not strikingly different from the psychological and social structure of its villages, except for Gurgaon, which is an outlier,” he explained.

“After a few days of travelling in Haryana, it seems like more than half of the outcome of these elections was pre-decided by the electorate even before the campaign began. The current chief minister is more popular than the former one (Khattar). But we cannot forget that even in 2019, BJP did not get a clear mandate—the state had almost voted for a change,” Yadav added. “My sense is, this time it will be a clear verdict in favour of Congress.”

New Delhi — Scientists say Indian farmers’ eager uptake of a painkiller for their cattle in the 1990s has led to the inadvertent deaths of half of a million people and massive economic losses — not from any harm to the cattle, but from the loss of millions of vultures, scavengers that historically devoured animals’ remains before they could rot and become vectors for disease.

In early 1990s, the patent on a painkiller called diclofenac lifted, making it cheap and widely available for India’s massive agricultural sector. Farmers use it to treat a wide array of conditions in cattle. But even a small amount of the drug is fatal to vultures. Since the beginning of its widespread use in India, the domestic vulture population has dropped from a whopping 50 million to just a few thousand — and according to a study published by the American Economic Association, the impact on humans has been monumental, reflecting the vital role the scavengers play.

Vultures have been a crucial part of India’s ecosystems for centuries. According to the authors of the study, entitled “The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse: Evidence From The Decline of Vultures in India,” the large, homely birds are a “keystone species” — one that plays an irreplaceable role in an ecosystem. 

They’re the only scavengers that feed entirely on carcasses, and they do it extremely efficiently, quickly devouring the remains and leaving little behind to spread disease. The study authors say India’s vultures would typically eat at least 50 million animal carcasses every year, before their population was decimated.

In doing so, they prevented the dead farm animals from rotting, and the deadly bacteria and other pathogens that thrive in carcasses from being transmitted into human populations.

“In a country like India with prohibitions on eating beef, most cattle end up turning into carcasses,” Anant Sudarshan, an associate professor of economics at the University of Warwick in England, who co-authored the study, told CBS News. “Vultures provide an incredible disposal service for free. … A group of vultures takes about 45 minutes to turn a cow carcass into bone.”

The vultures’ keen appetite also helped keep the populations of competing scavengers in check, such as feral dogs and rats, which can transmit rabies and a host of other diseases.

In 1994, farmers began giving diclofenac to their cattle and other livestock. The drug causes kidney failure and death in vultures that feed on the carcasses of animals given the painkiller, and the population of the birds shrank from 50 million to just 20,000 over the course of the ensuing decade alone.

Without the vultures around to do the job, farmers started disposing their dead livestock in local bodies of water, which caused water pollution — and another way for pathogens to reach humans.

Sudarshan and study co-author Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, examined the impact of the drastically reduced vulture population on human health by mapping vulture habitats with health data from more than 600 districts in India. They said their research shows 100,000 human deaths every year between 2000 and 2005 could be linked with the decreased vulture populations. 

It also shows economic losses they estimated at $69 billion per year, largely associated with premature human deaths due to the collapse of the scavenger population.

These deaths were caused, according to their research, by the spread of diseases that a thriving vulture population would have mitigated. Stray dog populations, and with them, the spread of rabies, also increased during the timeframe, as did the amount of bacteria measured in many local water sources.

“India is now the largest center of rabies in the world, as the feral dog population has grown dramatically,” Sudarshan told CBS News.

Without a major vulture rebound, the study authors said the spread of disease and resulting deaths will only continue in the coming years, as will the costs associated with health care.

India did ban diclofenac for veterinary use in 2006, but Sudarshan said the ban needs to be enforced much more effectively. He and Eyal have called for more conservation funding to boost vulture populations, but they’ve warned that even if the Indian government does mount a major effort, it will take at least a decade for the species to bounce back to the extent required because they’re “slow reproducers.”

As an alternative to bringing the vultures back, Sudarshan said India could build a network of incinerators around the country, but the estimated cost of that is about $1 billion per year, and they would use a huge amount of energy and create considerable air pollution, which is already a major problem for India. 

“So, it makes more sense to bring back the natural way of dealing with the millions of animal carcasses that India produces each year,” he said.

And he said that work must start urgently, as the “vultures began dying in the 1990s. India has not done anything three decades on.”

The government does spend about $3 million per year to save India’s native tigers. Sudarshan said while vultures may be far less of a tourist attraction, there’s a broader question about “the basis of our conservation policy.”

“Our paper shows that the cost of losing them [vultures] is about $69 billion a year, which is far higher than any benefits the tiger” brings, he said, adding: “We need to think from a cost effectiveness point of view and growth view, how should we pick species to conserve?”

“Understanding the role vultures play in human health underscores the importance of protecting wildlife – and not just the cute and cuddly,” said his co-author, Frank. “They all have a job to do in our ecosystems that impacts our lives.”

CNN
 — 

Anthony Bourdain loved haggis. But even the late, great American chef, writer and television host recognized that Scotland’s national dish, with its “sinister sheep parts” wrapped in a shroud of mystery and half-invented history, could be a hard sell.

“Don’t let them tell you otherwise, that’s really one of life’s great pleasures,” Bourdain said on one of his gastro-curious pilgrimages to Glasgow. “There is no more unfairly reviled food on Earth than the haggis.”

A mash-up of diced lung, liver and heart mixed with oatmeal, beef suet, onion and assorted spices, haggis was traditionally made by stuffing these raw ingredients into the stomach of a recently slain sheep and boiling the lot to a state of palatability.

Instagrammable is not the word that immediately comes to mind. In our 21st-century world, where “clean” eating and processed pap overlap, haggis can seem like an “Outlander”-style outlier from another age.

Yet, by some alchemy, once cooked to its required “warm-reekin’ (steaming)” state, it adds up to much more than the sum of its modest parts. It’s offaly charm has kept nose-to-tail eating alive among a younger generation of Scots that has largely turned its back on the tripe, liver and kidneys their predecessors enjoyed (or endured).

Carefully prepared, haggis tastes both oaty and meaty; it is dark and crumbly, a little crispy at the edges but still moist; earthy but also savory and spicy; deep-tasting and profoundly warming, the perfect foil for its traditional garnish of floury mashed potatoes and orange bashed turnip.

“It’s like a cuddle for the stomach,” says Nicola Turner, a 35-year-old office administrator from Helensburgh, a town on western Scotland’s Firth of Clyde.

Spice and texture

For children of the 1960s and ’70s, like crime novelist Ian Rankin, haggis meals were a choice between the classic meat-and-two-veg plate and the battered and deep-fried, chip-shop iteration loved by both his friend Bourdain and his quintessentially Scottish detective character, Inspector John Rebus.

Now myriad other treatments have blossomed.

“I’m pretty sure the first time I dined with AB in Edinburgh we had haggis in filo pastry with a jam-style – maybe blackcurrant – sauce,” Rankin recalled. “He was a big fan of haggis and of chip shops. Rebus will have enjoyed the occasional haggis supper from his local chip shop. He was definitely a fan, as am I.”

“It is all about the spicing and the texture,” says the Scottish food writer, novelist and cook Sue Lawrence, a champion of haggis’ adaptability for use in other dishes. “If you didn’t know what was in it, you wouldn’t think ‘oh that tastes of liver or whatever.’ It is all nicely chopped up and the oatmeal gives it a lovely texture. It could easily be a nice, big mince dish.”

Lawrence uses haggis as an alternative to beef and pork ragù in lasagna and in her pastilla, a version of the North African dish in which a hand-made haggis from the Isle of Mull substitutes for the traditional poultry or seafood filling. The filo pastry savory is flavored with the spice blend ras el hanout, apricots, chile, orange zest and almonds before being sprinkled with cinnamon and icing sugar.

Such cultural crossovers serve as a reminder that haggis could easily be a dish with nothing specifically Scottish about it at all. Records of similar quick and portable preparations of the fast-perishing innards of sheep and other animals date back to ancient Rome and Greece.

Haggis-like combinations of offal and grains are part of the culinary history of several countries. Spain has chireta, Romania drob and Sweden polsa, while chaudin, or ponce, is a rice and meat-stuffed pig stomach that is a staple of Cajun cooking.

In neighboring England, recipes for “hagese,” “hagws of a schepe,” “haggas” or “haggus” pop up in recipe books published between the 15th and 17th centuries, probably preceding written records north of the border.

Etymological evidence points to the term “haggis” having its roots in Old Norse, suggesting an early version of an oat-and-offal sausage might have arrived in Britain and Ireland on a Viking longboat.

But ever since it was first optioned by the poet Robert Burns in the late 1700s, the haggis backstory has been monopolized by Scotland and the Scots, sometimes mischievously.

It is, according to the kind of lore that Burns engendered, the dish a doughty Highlander would carry with him as he drove cattle through the glens to the markets of the central belt or the perfect picnic for a whisky smuggler plying his illicit trade by moonlight.

From such romantic notions it was a short step to turning the haggis into a wee wild beastie, one with longer legs on one side that was thus condemned to run round and round whichever hill it lived on. In 2003, a poll of American tourists in Scotland found that one in three of them believed they might encounter such a confused creature on a Caledonian vacation.

Bourdain, a native New Yorker, may have qualified as haggis’ biggest admirer since Burns, but his compatriots at the US Department of Agriculture remain unconverted to offal-filled paunch. Haggis imports into the United States were prohibited in 1971 as part of a ban on the consumption of all livestock lungs. Authentic versions of old school haggis remain culinary contraband in the US, as hard to lay your hands on as Cuban cigars.

Across the rest of the world, it’s a different story. According to leading producer Simon Howie, haggis is more widely appreciated and consumed now than it has been since Burns improvised his “Address to a Haggis” for the entertainment of well-to-do Edinburgh acquaintances.

Firmly tongue-in-cheek, the poem lauds the “Great chieftain o’ the pudding race,” as exactly the kind of unpretentious, hearty fare required to nourish a nation of braveheart warriors.

In comparison to the enfeebling foreign muck enjoyed by the capital’s claret-quaffing elites of the time – the olio, fricassée or ragoût that would “sicken a sow” – Burns urges his readers to wonder at the magical impact of haggis on his fellow sons of Scotland’s soil.

As the English translation of the original Scots language version puts it:

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed/

The trembling earth resounds his tread/

Clap in his ample fist a blade/

He’ll make it whistle/

And legs and arms and heads will cut/

Off like the heads of thistles

These days synthetic casings have largely replaced stomach but ovine and porcine innards remain at the core of most of the haggis produced in its homeland, said Howie, who estimates that his company Simon Howie Butchers, accounts for around 60% of the roughly two million haggises produced every year.

For Howie, versatility, value for money and convenience explain why this staple of the Scottish larder is thriving. Typically haggis retails in Scotland, which accounts for half of global consumption by volume, for around £6, or $7.70 per kilogram ($3.36/pound). That’s around half the price of less expensive cuts of beef or a third of the price of Scotch lamb while enjoying a fairly similar nutritional and calorific profile.

“You can give your kids a meal that is not full of things you don’t want to feed them – for a few pounds you can feed three strapping lads,” Howie said.

“From a kitchen perspective, it is very simple because when it leaves our factory it is already cooked. So when you or a restaurant owner gets it into the kitchen all you have to do is heat it up to be piping hot. It couldn’t be more basic: a student with no cooking skills or a Michelin-starred chef do exactly the same thing to put it out on the plate.”

Its texture means haggis can also be usefully deployed in fine dining alongside leaner meat like venison or as a stuffing for poultry and game birds. Its spicy intensity means it is also finding uses in canapés and as a crouton-borne garnish for soups.

Buoyant sales are also underpinned by the increasing consumption of haggis in forms inspired by Scotland’s ethnic minorities.

Glasgow’s Sikh community pioneered haggis pakora in the 1990s and samosas, spring rolls and quesadillas have followed in its wake, often using a vegetarian version of the protein in which the offal is replaced by a mix of vegetables, pulses and mushrooms.

Such dishes are more than culinary twists. They are badges of belonging, and an indication that, two centuries after Burns grabbed it for the nation, haggis is as intimately entwined with Scots identity as ever.

Just ask Ross O’Cinneide, a promising 14-year-old fly-half in the junior section of Stirling County rugby club.

“Most of my friends and I like haggis,” he says. “Mum makes it for us sometimes after rugby and it’s got a very nice warming feeling. And it’s nice because it’s purely Scottish.”