Rajasthan polls: Congress battles anti-incumbency in two-horse race

Jaipur: Last month, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said the Assembly contest in Rajasthan will be “very close”, sounding less confident of his party’s chances in the state it rules compared to some others going to the polls around the same time.

He might have got the analysis right.

In Rajasthan – which will see a direct fight between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party on November 23 – anti-incumbency is an important factor. Since 1993, when the BJP came to power after a stint of President’s rule, the state has alternated between the Congress and the BJP.

This makes it the BJP “turn” now to occupy the state secretariat.

The BJP also has the added advantage of being in power at the Centre, which allows it to pitch to voters its “double-engine” capability – a promise of more development if the governments in Delhi and the state are run by the same party.

But Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot has been at work for months now, countering the expected anti-incumbency by launching a series of welfare schemes – and going the whole hog in publicising them as part of his vision for the state.

The schemes include a Rs 25-lakh health insurance cover, an urban employment guarantee scheme, Rs 1,000 per month as social security and cooking gas cylinders for only Rs 500 for the Ujjwala scheme beneficiaries.

He also encouraged the eligible beneficiaries to register for these welfare schemes at “inflation relief camps”, implying that his initiatives counter the situation created by the BJP government at the Centre.

For state government employees, he played the OPS card. The restoration of the Old Pension Scheme benefits an estimated 35 lakh people, if families of the government workers are counted in.

And then, just before the model code of conduct for elections kicked in – barring governments from making major announcements – he ordered holding a caste survey in the state.

But Gehlot’s Congress is a divided house in Rajasthan with the CM and his former deputy Sachin Pilot in a leadership tussle.

In 2020, the younger Congress leader mounted an open rebellion against the veteran. And this year, he launched an agitation indirectly targeting the Gehlot government over its “failure” to act on corruption he claimed the former BJP dispensation had indulged in.

Pilot also did not spare the government over exam paper leaks during recruitment exams, an issue that the rival BJP is now harping on.

The party’s central leadership, however, has hammered out a truce of sorts. But it’s not clear if this ceasefire will hold when the party selects candidates, or the Congress workers – many of them split between the two camps – get down to serious electioneering with the announcement of the election dates.

Following the practice it has adopted elsewhere, the BJP has not projected a CM face. Its Rajasthan unit too faces factionalism and former, two-time chief minister Vasundhara Raje’s supporters see her as the prime candidate for the top job again.

If there is a face to the BJP campaign, it is Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He has already addressed a series of rallies in the state, including one in Gehlot’s own constituency, Sardarpura in Jodhpur.

In Jodhpur, he brought up last year’s communal violence in the district and implied that the Gehlot government has been going soft on its “vote bank”, an indirect reference to Muslim voters.

“Appeasement” and the BJP’s Hindutva appeal could play a major role in the election fought by the party, with Modi leading the charge.

The BJP has also been targeting the state government over law and order, particularly on crime against women. And then there is the matter of a “red diary” which, it is claimed, carried details of financial irregularities. Rajendra Gudha, a sacked member of the Gehlot ministry claims to possess this.

Apart from projecting its welfare schemes, the state’s ruling party is set to make the Eastern Rajasthan Canal Project a major plank.

It has accused the BJP-led Centre of not giving it the “promised” national project status to ERCP, meant to bring water for drinking and irrigation to the parched eastern districts.

Gehlot has blamed Union Jal Shakti Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, who is the BJP MP from his own home district Jodhpur, for not doing enough for his home state on ERCP.

To make it worse for the BJP, it is on a relatively weak wicket in some of the constituencies in the region. And the Congress has said it will formally begin its Rajasthan campaign from the ERCP districts.

The Rashtriya Lok Dal, Bahujan Samaj Party, Rashtriya Loktantrik Party, Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Asadudin Owaisi’s AIMIM are also expected to field candidates in a handful of the 200 assembly constituencies in the state.

But essentially, Rajasthan is a two-horse race. In the 2018 Assembly polls, Congress won 99 of the 199 seats where elections were held (polling in one constituency was cancelled because of a candidate’s death). The BJP won 73.

In the Lok Sabha polls the following year, the BJP bagged 24 of the 25 seats. The remaining one went to its ally, the RLP.