Jaipur: In front of a large crowd in Rajasthan’s Sikar district on Tuesday (March 26), state Congress president Govind Singh Dotasra urged the public to vote against Sumedhanand Saraswati – the two-term incumbent BJP MP from Sikar – in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
Dotasra, a Jat legislator from the Lachhmangarh assembly constituency in Sikar, who has been heading the state Congress since 2020, was also flanked by former Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot and multiple Congress MLAs at the event.
But Tuesday’s rally in Sikar was a rare exception because the senior Congress leaders were not seeking votes for a candidate from the grand old party. Instead, they were gathered in support of senior Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Amra Ram, who is the INDIA alliance’s candidate from Sikar.
“Lal aur tiranga saath saath lehrayenge aur Amra Ram ji Delhi jayenge (We will hoist the red and tricolour together and Amra Ram ji will go to Delhi),” Dotasra told the cheering crowd from the stage, which also had the presence of CPI(M) leaders including Brinda Karat.
The rally, organised to mark the filing of nominations for the candidature of Amra Ram, reflected the INDIA bloc’s efforts to stop the BJP and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the Hindi heartland, where the saffron party has swept most seats in the Lok Sabha elections in the last 10 years.
The Congress has failed to win a single parliamentary seat out of Rajasthan’s 25 Lok Sabha seats in 2014 and 2019.
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The extent of the Congress’s failure to take on the BJP in the battle for parliamentary seats can be gauged from the fact that despite winning the December 2018 assembly elections in Rajasthan and forming the government with Gehlot as the chief minister, the Congress had drawn a blank in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections held just months after the state polls.
While the Congress doesn’t have a history in recent years to tie up with other parties in Rajasthan for the Lok Sabha elections, its outlook has changed after two consecutive electoral drubbings in the 2014 and 2019 elections.
Learning from its past outings, before the upcoming Lok Sabha elections this year, the Congress has allied with the CPI(M) and the Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (RLP) under the banner of the INDIA alliance for two out of the 25 Lok Sabha seats in Rajasthan. The Congress, which is the main opposition in BJP-ruled Rajasthan, will not be fielding its candidates in the Sikar and Nagaur Lok Sabha seats and instead will support the INDIA bloc’s candidate.
Congress and CPI(M) alliance in Sikar: Eye on farmer votes
The Shekhawati region in Rajasthan, of which Sikar is a part, has a large farmer population, predominantly from the Jat community. While Jats have traditionally been supporters of the Congress, since the party introduced land reforms and ended the feudal Jagrdari system in Rajasthan, the CPI(M) has remained a strong political force in the area, at times also electing its representatives to the state assembly. In the 2018 assembly elections, two CPI(M) MLAs were victorious, while Amra Ram, the INDIA bloc’s candidate from Sikar, is a four-term former legislator.
The All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), the farmer wing of the CPI(M), also has a large cadre base in districts such as Sikar.
In Rajasthan, a state where the political arena is largely bipolar and is dominated by the Congress and BJP, the space for any third political force has remained negligible.
In recent years, the Shekhawati region, where a large segment of the population is engaged in farming activities, has witnessed several protests against the BJP government at the Centre over issues such as the farmer agitation and the demonstrations against the Agniveer scheme of army recruitment.
Districts such as Sikar also send a large number of youngsters to the armed forces each year. The region has witnessed massive protests against the Agniveer scheme in recent years.
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The Congress and CPI(M) alliance hopes to tap this discontent by merging their collective vote banks, hoping that a transfer of votes may just be enough to beat the BJP, which had won the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in Sikar by a margin of more than 2.9 lakh votes.
While BJP has once again fielded its incumbent MP Sumedhanand Saraswati from Sikar, the Congress has also faced the challenge of finding a strong candidate from the Sikar seat. Former MP Subhash Maharia, who was the Congress’s candidate for the last Lok Sabha elections from Sikar, had joined the BJP before the 2023 assembly elections, and state Congress president Dotasra – the Congress’s biggest leader from the district – didn’t show any interest to shift to national politics.
It was at this juncture that the party decided to ally with CPI(M) and bank on Amra Ram, who, apart from being from the numerically dominant Jat community, is also an established leader from the district with a history of raising farmers’ issues, giving the INDIA alliance a chance in the Shekhawat heartland.
In Jatland Nagaur, Hanuman Beniwal’s shift from NDA to INDIA
Hanuman Beniwal, the supremo of the RLP has come full circle in his political trajectory. Back in 2019, he was the candidate of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and successfully contested the Lok Sabha elections from Nagaur with the support of the BJP, which chose to enter into an alliance with the RLP for the parliamentary constituency which has been held by many Jat politicians in the past.
Five years later, Beniwal is now the INDIA alliance’s candidate from Nagaur and is facing Jyoti Mirdha, who has been fielded by the BJP from the seat. Incidentally, Mirdha was the Congress candidate whom Beniwal had defeated from Nagaur in 2019. Subsequently, Mirdha had joined the BJP last year, making the battle for Nagaur an electoral contest wherein both the contenders are the same but have changed sides in the last five years.
Hanuman Beniwal filing his nomination for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. Photo: X/@hanumanbeniwal
A four-term MLA, Beniwal had formed the RLP in 2018 with the objective of emerging as a third force in the state. In the first elections the RLP contested in 2018, it won three seats in the 200-member assembly, which reduced to one seat – presently held by Beniwal himself – in 2023.
While Beniwal has been a fierce detractor of BJP and Congress leaders including former chief ministers Vasundhara Raje and Ashok Gehlot and has always spoken against both parties, he made a timely decision of moving to the NDA fold and tying up with the BJP before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The result was Beniwal becoming an MP from Nagaur, a seat that in the past has been held by Jat leaders such as Ram Niwas Mirdha and Nathu Ram Mirdha.
Beniwal had quit the NDA in 2020 following the farmers’ agitation and had remained distant from both the BJP and Congress, before deciding to join the INDIA bloc earlier this month.
A major challenge for Beniwal would be to get the cooperation of the Congress leaders from Nagaur, many of whom have been subject to his verbal volleys in the past. For now, both the Congress and the RLP are maintaining a united front.
During Beniwal’s first tour of Nagaur after being declared as the INDIA alliance’s candidate for the Lok Sabha seat, he was accompanied by all the Congress MLAs and the party’s major leaders from the district.
