Jaipur: After winning all 25 Lok Sabha seats in Rajasthan two consecutive times in 2014 and 2019, the BJP-led NDA faltered in Rajasthan on Tuesday, with the Congress and its allies winning 11 parliamentary seats in the desert state, bringing down the BJP’s tally to 14.
The BJP’s loss of seats will boost the morale of the Congress, which had lost power in the state in December last year.
At the same time, the saffron party’s performance will also put under the scanner the BJP’s decision to appoint the relatively unknown Bhajan Lal Sharma as the state’s chief minister instead of its two-time former chief minister Vasundhara Raje.
Among the three states in the Hindi heartland where the BJP won and formed the government at the end of last year – the other two being Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh – Rajasthan was the only state where the party couldn’t repeat its performance from previous years.
While the BJP won all 29 seats in Madhya Pradesh, it won 10 out of the 11 seats in Chhattisgarh. At such a juncture, the loss of 11 seats in neighbouring Rajasthan for the party, whose leaders had expressed confidence of winning all 25 constituencies, mark a well-fought victory for the Congress and its allies.
Anger over Agniveer in Shekhawati belt and Jat support for opposition
On Tuesday, the Congress and its allies won the three parliamentary constituencies of Churu, Sikar and Jhunjhunu. Collectively, these three districts form the Shekhawati region.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
The Shekhawati region is among the biggest contributors of personnel to the armed forces, with a large chunk of the youth from this area aspiring to join the Indian Army each year.
The area had witnessed massive protests by the youth after the Agniveer Scheme was announced by the BJP government in the Centre in 2022. In the December 2023 assembly elections, the Congress, despite losing power, performed well in the Shekhawati belt and got more seats than the BJP in the region.
Prior to the Lok Sabha elections, some strategic decisions made by the Congress seem to have born fruit, which led to the grand old party and its allies winning the Churu, Sikar and Jhunjhunu seats on Tuesday.
In Churu, the Congress had roped in Rahul Kaswan, the BJP MP from Churu in 2014 and 2018, after the latter was denied a ticket by the saffron party. Kaswan is a powerful Jat leader whose family has held the Churu Lok Sabha seat for more than two decades.
During his campaigning, Kaswan made the elections in Churu appear like a Jat vs Rajput contest as it was widely believed that senior BJP leader Rajendra Rathore, a Rajput, was instrumental behind Kaswan not getting a ticket from the BJP because Rathore’s supporters accused Kaswan of plotting the former’s defeat in the 2023 assembly elections from Churu district’s Taranagar Assembly constituency.
Even though former Paralympian Devendra Jhajharia, the BJP candidate from Churu was a Jat himself, it was largely considered as a proxy war between Rathore and Kaswan.
With the numerically strong Jat population in the district firmly backing Kaswan, the Congress won the Churu seat by a margin of more than 72,000 votes.
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The Congress’s Brijendra Singh Ola, the son of former Union Minister Sis Ram Ola also won the Jhunjhunu seat by defeating the BJP’s Shubhkaran Choudhary.
The Jat community’s support for the Congress is one of the factors which helped the party to open its account in the state after a decade in the Lok Sabha elections.
During the campaigning for the election, the Congress’s Rajasthan state president Govind Singh Dotasra, who is among the state’s top Jat leaders, repeatedly appealed to the farmer community – in Rajasthan, the Jat community forms the dominant agrarian class – to vote against the BJP, which he termed to be against farmers.
The Sachin Pilot factor and BJP’s losses in eastern Rajasthan
Another region where the Congress outperformed the BJP was in eastern Rajasthan, which has a substantial Dalit and Adivasi population.
The Congress won the Karauli-Dholpur, Bharatpur, Dausa and Tonk-Sawai Madhopur constituencies in eastern Rajasthan.
Back in 2018, the Congress had swept these regions and decimated the BJP during the assembly elections in eastern Rajasthan, and had formed the government. The BJP could win only one out of the 24 assembly constituencies in the districts of Bharatpur, Dausa, Karauli, Dholpur and Sawai Madhopur.
But in the 2023 assembly elections, the BJP had made a comeback, winning 13 seats in these districts while the Congress could win in only eight constituencies in the region.
Despite the defeat in the assembly elections, the Congress appears to have sprung back in the Lok Sabha elections, leaving the BJP behind in eastern Rajasthan.
Eastern Rajasthan is also the stronghold of Congress leader and former deputy chief minister Sachin Pilot, in whose stronghold of Dausa, the Congress’s Murari Lal Meena won by a margin of more than 2.3 lakh votes, the highest for any Congress candidate in Rajasthan.
Pilot had extensively campaigned for the party in eastern Rajasthan, backing his supporters.
In fact, three of the Congress leaders who won from eastern Rajasthan on Tuesday – Murari Lal Meena from Dausa, Harish Chandra Meena from Tonk-Sawai Madhopur and Brijendra Singh Ola from Jhunjhunu – were among the 18 loyalist MLAs who had sided with Pilot during the latter’s rebellion against former chief minister Ashok Gehlot in July-August 2020.
BJP wins, but a sharp fall from the Raje era
The BJP won 14 seats – Bikaner, Jaipur Rural, Jaipur, Alwar, Ajmer, Pali, Jodhpur, Jalore, Udaipur, Chittorgarh, Rajsamand, Bhilwara, Kota and Jhalawar-Baran.
Among the regions where the BJP performed well is Mewar in southern Rajasthan, where BJP candidates were set to comfortably win the Lok Sabha seats of Udaipur, Rajsamand, Bhilwara and Chittorgarh. The Mewar region is a traditional stronghold for the saffron party.
Similarly, the party also won the state capital of Jaipur.
Among the four Union ministers from Rajasthan, while Gajendra Singh Shekhawat (Jodhpur), Arjun Ram Meghwal (Bikaner) and Bhupender Yadav (Alwar) won, another Union minister Kailash Choudhary lost from the Barmer constituency and was pushed to the third position, behind independent candidate and Sheo MLA Ravindra Singh Bhati and the Congress’s Ummeda Ram Beniwal, who won by a margin of 1.1 lakh votes from the seat.
The BJP’s Lumbaram Choudhary defeated Vaibhav Gehlot, the son of former chief minister Ashok Gehlot from Jalore.
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But more than its wins, what is significant is the BJP conceding 11 seats to the opposition in Rajasthan, a state where the NDA had won all 25 seats in 2014 and 2019, when Vasundhara Raje was the party’s tallest leader in the state.
Raje, who is known to share a frosty relationship with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was overlooked by the BJP while selecting the chief minister of Rajasthan, with first-time MLA Bhajan Lal Sharma being elevated to the top post by the party. On Tuesday, Raje’s son Dushyant Singh won the Jhalawar-Baran seat for the BJP by a huge margin of 3.7 lakh votes.
The move was similar to what the BJP did after winning Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, where senior chief ministers such as Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Raman Singh were not given another term and replaced with lesser-known faces.
While the BJP did capture most of the seats in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the party took a hit in Rajasthan, where the Congress ran a sustained campaign, terming the Bhajan Lal Sharma-led government as a ‘parchi sarkar’, a government that takes instructions from slips sent by New Delhi.
BAP humbles Modi in Banswara and success of alliance politics
One of the most discussed moments in the run up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s controversial speech in Rajasthan’s Banswara, which had resulted in massive outrage with the opposition accusing him of targeting Muslims.
As the counting of votes progressed, the results showed that BJP was staring at a huge loss from Banswara, where the Bharat Adivasi Party’s (BAP’s) candidate and incumbent MLA from Chorasi Rajkumar Roat won with a margin of more than 2.4 lakh votes.
The BAP, which stands for tribal unity and assertion and considers Adivasis out of the traditional Hindu fold, handed the BJP’s Mahendrajeet Singh Malviya – a Congress turncoat and local strongman who has been a multiple-time MLA and MP – one of the biggest defeats of his career.
After seeing the groundswell of support for the BAP in the region, the Congress had pledged support to the party. Even though a rebel Congress candidate filed nominations under the party’s symbol, senior leaders of the Congress had urged the public to vote for the BAP, which won the seat by a huge margin.
Alliances seemed to have helped the opposition to consolidate support against the BJP.
In the Nagaur constituency, Hanuman Beniwal, the chief of the Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (RLP), defeated the BJP’s Jyoti Mirdha. The Congress and RLP had allied before the elections, with Beniwal being fielded as the INDIA alliance’s candidate.
Similarly, in Sikar, which is the home district of state Congress president Dotasra, CPI(M)’s Amra Ram was fielded as the candidate from the INDIA alliance. He defeated BJP leader and incumbent Sikar MP Sumedhanand Saraswati.
Being a Jat farmer leader in the Shekhawati, which has a substantial farmer population, also worked in favour of Ram and the INDIA alliance in the electoral battle for Sikar.
Congress’s decision to not field their own candidates in these constituencies and instead support candidates from other parties resulted in a successful transfer of votes to its alliance partners, not a small feat in a state where any third force has failed to make inroads owing its history of being a largely two-party state.
