New Delhi: The 56-year-old Bhajanlal Sharma is the archetypical Sangh man – state general secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party for four terms yet so low-profile that journalists in Rajasthan were left scrambling to get more information on their new chief minister.
“Humble”, “a sangathan man”, a “Vidhyarthi man” (Sharma was a member of the ABVP) – the adjectives which are being used to describe Sharma are all of the kind favoured by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Descriptors that could not be more different than the ones used to define his predecessor, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, who has dominated the BJP’s politics in the state for the past 25 years.
Going by public popularity, Raje Scindia should have been the logical choice for chief minister. Every poll going into these elections put her ahead of all other BJP candidates for the post. But going by what was happening within the party, she was always unlikely to be made chief minister.
The story of the BJP in Rajasthan for over ten years has consisted of the top leadership of the BJP and the RSS trying to sideline her and finding it hard to do so. Her clout in the state and the support she enjoys from party workers was evident in the role she eventually played in the assembly elections.
After a fairly public alienation for a long period, the party was forced to mend fences and accommodate many of those she favoured for tickets. It also requested her to campaign, which she did, reasserting the hold she has among the public.
It was not as if the resistance within the party had had no impact on her. In the lead up to the elections, she was forced to accept the denial of a ticket to Yunus Khan, who was seen as close to her. Khan later won the Deedwana seat as an independent.
Dropping him from the list was the clearest signal of the hard line the new administration is likely to pursue. Many Muslim voters in the course of this campaign spoke about how, whatever be the perils of the BJP, they felt safe as long as Raje Scindia had been in charge.
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Her second term as chief minister had already seen her making concessions to the RSS, giving way to many Sangh initiatives on issues such as changes in the textbooks and school curriculum.
These were, at best, attempts by her to go along with a party which had been making it amply clear that it wanted to move to a more overt RSS-Hindutva politics, one that Raje Scindia could only pretend to adhere to but one which Bhajanlal Sharma embodies.
A biographical note titled jeevan parichay (life introduction) doing the rounds lists Sharma’s achievements. It goes from his days in the Akhil Bharitya Vidyarthi Parishad to his initial forays into politics as a sarpanch of the gram panchayat Attari, in Nadbai, Bharatpur where he comes from. It’s a list which reinforces the image of Sharma as a disciplined party member who has slowly made his way to the top, without ever expecting to become chief minister.
In 2003, Sharma first contested the assembly elections on a ticket given by the Rashtriya Samajik Nyaya Manch (RSNM), a party formed shortly before the elections by Lokendra Singh Kalvi and Devi Singh Bhati. Sharma lost the elections, getting less than 6,000 votes.
The party that he along with a number of other RSS figures had joined represented two main planks. The first was to work for the economically backward sections of upper-caste communities like Brahmins and Rajputs. The second was a demand to split the OBC quota into two categories after the Jats had been given OBC status in Rajasthan.
Sharma’s affiliation to an overt upper-caste politics couched in terms of economic backwardness anticipated the BJP’s push for an Economically Weaker Section (EWS) quota. Through his past association with the RSNM, he was also connected to several figures who embodied one of the BJP’s main thrusts on the OBC quota, a separation of the ‘creamy layer’ from the rest.
In selecting a Gond ST chief minister in Chhattisgarh, an OBC Yadav in MP and a Brahmin candidate in Rajasthan who represents the economic idea of reservation and is linked to a demand to split the OBC quota, the BJP seems to have covered all its bases going into the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
In the 2023 Rajasthan elections, 20 years after his first foray, Sharma’s nomination from Sanganer, an assembly constituency which falls within the Jaipur Lok Sabha constituency, caused some consternation as he replaced Ashok Lahoty, the sitting MLA who had charges of corruption against him. Lahoty’s supporters protested the decision but Sharma won comfortably with 58.4% of the voteshare.
Yet, no one had thought of him as even a participant in the race to become chief minister. In the intense speculation which preceded the announcement, he was on no one’s list of frontrunners. But as the chief ministers of MP and Chhattisgarh were announced, it became increasingly clear that the party was looking to change the old guard. Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s exit in Madhya Pradesh was read as clear signal that the chief minister’s role was unlikely to go to Vasundhra Raje Scindia.
The party, though, still needed her assent. Over the past few days, Hindi channels ran headlines about MLAs thronging Raje Scindia’s residence, clamouring for her to be made chief minister. J.P. Nadda, the BJP president, was sent to negotiate and try and accommodate some of her demands on who she could and could not endorse.
In the same carefully orchestrated optics that saw Chouhan announce his successor’s name, it was finally Raje Scindia who was made to propose the name of Sharma as the chief minister.
If Sharma’s name was a surprise the choice of the two deputy chief ministers is more predictable – Diya Kumari, 52, from the erstwhile royal family of Jaipur, and 54-year-old Prem Chand Bairwa, the sitting MLA and a seasoned politician from Dudu, which falls in the Ajmer Lok Sabha seat.
Diya Kumari’s rise in the BJP is now seen as an attempt to project a more pliable alternative to Raje Scindia. Both women from “royal” lineages, the two once shared a mentor-protégé relationship but are now pitted against each other. The odds are now stacked in favour of Diya, who is close to the central leadership and as deputy chief minister is within striking distance of the top job in the state. For Raje Scindia, on the other hand, the BJP’s comfortable win in 2023, without projecting her or anyone else as the chief ministerial face, signals a shift away from the era of her dominance
The strongest evidence of the party high command’s support to Diya Kumari came when she replaced Narpat Singh Rajvi, sitting MLA and son-in-law of three-time Rajasthan chief minister Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, from his traditional seat of Vidhyadhar Nagar. Rajvi was sent to contest from Chittor where he suffered a crushing defeat.
The other deputy chief minister, Prem Chand, from the Bairwa Dalit community is seen as the counter balance to a Brahmin chief minister and a Rajput deputy chief minister. While both these upper caste communities have electorally consolidated behind the BJP, the party has not enjoyed the same dominance among Dalit voters. The Lokniti-CSDS post-poll survey conducted after the election results shows that 48% of the Dalit vote went to the Congress as opposed to 33% to the BJP.
There is another choice that may go unremarked upon but is a crucial indicator of the direction in which the post-Raje Scindia government is headed. Vasudev Devnani, a Sindhi, has been appointed to the post of speaker. In the previous Vasundhra Raje Scindia government, he held the post of education minister, and was instrumental in the saffronisation of education.
