BJP MLA promises Haryana’s bachelors. Behind it is a tragic story
Gurugram: Bimla Chaudhary, the BJP MLA from Pataudi, was in Rewari Thursday to campaign for the party’s municipal council candidate Vinita Pippal. Haryana Health Minister Arti Rao was on the stage beside her. Then Chaudhary leaned into the microphone and made a promise that brought the house down.
“My mothers and sisters,” she said, “vote to make Vinita win; and let me make one more promise from this stage today—the responsibility of getting young men sitting around as bachelors married, that too is mine. Just give us your blessings.”
The gathering erupted in laughter. Minister Arti Rao, rather than letting the moment pass, picked it up and ran with it. Bimla Chaudhary, she said, had apparently opened a “marriage bureau” in Rewari, and would surely keep her word.
Afterwards, speaking to reporters, Chaudhary elaborated with some enthusiasm. “I am a daughter of Palwal. I have already arranged marriages for young men from Rewari, Rampura, and Bijlighar, most of them are married around Palwal. Now no one will remain a bachelor. First vote, then get your marriage arranged,” she said.
The audience laughed. The minister laughed. The MLA laughed.
Nobody asked the obvious question: how, exactly, does a state arrive at a point where the chronic absence of marriageable women becomes an electoral selling point—something to campaign on, something to chuckle about from a public stage?
This joke has a history.
Bimla Chaudhary is not the first BJP leader in Haryana to have extracted electoral mileage by promising to help Haryana’s bachelors find the one.
In July 2014, as the party was campaigning for what would become its first-ever majority government in the state, the then Kisan Morcha national president O.P. Dhankar, who subsequently became a Cabinet Minister and state party chief, told a workers’ meeting that a BJP government would ‘bring girls from Bihar’ to ensure Haryana’s young men could get married.
The Bihar Assembly was adjourned the following day. Legislators of the Janata Dal (United) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal staged demonstrations at the Assembly gate, raised slogans, and demanded Dhankar’s arrest. Dhankar offered a clarification—he had meant honourable marriages with full security, he said, and his words had been misinterpreted.
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The bachelors of Haryana
The 2011 Census recorded a sex ratio of 879 women per 1,000 men in Haryana, among the worst in the country. The child sex ratio for the 0-6 age group was starker still: 834 girls per 1,000 boys, a number that reflected, with clinical precision, the scale of sex-selective abortion that had been practised across the state for decades.
Women in Haryana who are of marriageable age today, in their twenties and early thirties, were born in those years. They are the generation the numbers describe.
The Haryana government has, since 2014, claimed credit for improving the sex ratio at birth through the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao programme, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi with considerable ceremony in Panipat.
Phillippe Tretiack, a French journalist working for Elle magazine, came to India in 2009 to report on female foeticide and chose Haryana for his fieldwork, an obvious choice, as it turned out. He travelled through the state’s villages accompanied by G.L. Singhal, a former State Drugs Controller who has worked extensively on the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, 1994.
Singhal told The Print that village after village Tretiack encountered the same scene—clusters of men between 25 and 45 years of age, all unmarried, gathered around card games. They looked up at him and asked, laughingly: “Can you get us women from Vietnam, Russia, or from anywhere else?”
Tretiack’s piece, published in the French edition of Elle as “Le foeticide des filles en Inde, des femmes en voie de disparition” (Female foeticide in India: women on the verge of disappearance”) and later translated into English version of the magazine by Mrinalini Harchandrai as “She Didn’t Come Home”, captured what official statistics could only point to—a society that had spent a generation making its own women disappear, and was only now beginning to reckon with what that meant for the men left behind.
Who is Bimla Chaudhary
Bimla Chaudhary is BJP’s MLA from Pataudi assembly constituency. She was first elected to the assembly in 2014. She was elected again in 2024 defeating Congress’ Pearl Chaudhary, now president of Haryana Women’s Congress.
Voting for the Rewari Nagar Parishad, along with the Panchkula, Sonipat and Ambala municipal corporations and the Uklana, Sampla and Dharuhera municipal committees, is scheduled for 10 May. Results will be declared on 13 May.
Haryana’s bachelors will still be waiting for brides on 14 May.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
Also Read: Beti Bachao an empty slogan in Haryana now. Sex ratio falls again, 9 districts at crisis point
