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Manohar Lal Khattar to be first BJP CM of Haryana

Low-profile organisation man, a non-Jat, elected as legislature party leader

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Manohar Lal Khattar submits letter staking claim to form government to governor Kaptan Singh Solanki in Chandigarh on Tuesday
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It was from Karnal, the seat Manohar Lal Khattar contested, that prime minister Narendra Modi had begun his campaign in the recent assembly elections. The association between the two leaders, both of whom have been RSS pracharaks, goes back to the 1990s when Modi was in-charge of Haryana.

The 60-year-old bachelor, who is a first-time MLA, was on Tuesday unanimously elected Leader of the BJP Legislature Party in Haryana making way for becoming the first chief minister of the party in the state. Union parliamentary affairs minister Venkaiah Naidu and BJP vice president Dinesh Sharma were present at the meeting as central observers.

The low-profile Khattar is known for his organisational skills which were demonstrated in the Lok Sabha elections this year as chairman of the BJP's election committee in Haryana, where the party won six of the eight seats it contested.

Khattar comes from a humble background. His family had migrated from Pakistan to a village in Rohtak of erstwhile united Punjab in 1947. It was in this village that he was born. Having almost four decades of association with RSS as its pracharak in Haryana and several other north Indian states, Khattar masterminded several BJP victories in north India.

Khattar joined RSS in early 1970s as a pracharak and also played a key role in spreading Sangh's agenda. In 1992, he formally joined BJP and has been an active member ever since. It was in 1996 that he started working with Modi in Haryana.

In 2002, he was given the charge of elections in Jammu and Kashmir and in 2004, he took charge as election prabhari (in-charge) of 12 states including Delhi and Rajasthan.

Though Khattar, who will be the first Punjabi chief minister in the state, is from Rohtak, BJP fielded him from Karnal where there is a high concentration of people of Punjabi ethnicity. After the election, which the party fought under Modi's leadership, the BJP decided on choosing a chief minister from among the non-Jats, whose votes had consolidated in BJP's favour. This is the first time the BJP had fought the elections on its own in the state.

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