After Gujarat all eyes are now on Rajasthan where the BJP and the Congress will go all out to woo voters for the bypolls for two Lok Sabha and one Assembly seats. The polls are to be held on 29 January.
The high-stakes Lok Sabha seats where polls are to be held are the “sensitive” Alwar where cow vigilantes killed two persons on suspicion of cow smuggling last year and Ajmer. The bypolls are being held following the death of Ajmer MP Sanwar Lal Jat and Alwar MP Chand Nath.
Political analysts and observers view it as a sort of semi finals before the Assembly polls are scheduled to be held in the state in November/December and Lok Sabha polls in 2019.
National-Level Leaders Not Contesting Bypoll
To cash in on the sympathy wave, the BJP has fielded Ramswaroop Lamba, son of former minister Sanwar Lal Jat, as its candidate from Ajmer and Dr Jaswant Singh Yadav, a minister in Vasundhara Raje’s cabinet from Alwar. The Congress has named Raghu Sharma, an ex- MLA from Kekri in Ajmer district and Dr Karan Singh Yadav, a former MP from Alwar.
Both Jitendra Singh, a close aide of Congress national president Rahul Gandhi, and state president of the Congress Sachin Pilot are not contesting elections this time.
When former chief minister Ashok Gehlot was asked why these leaders are not fighting, he said that it’s the party’s strategy which cannot be disclosed.
If political observers are to be believed, Sachin Pilot would not have liked to go to Lok Sabha for a year and then fight polls again. If he would have lost, it would have completely derailed the Congress strategy and campaign both for the forthcoming Assembly and Lok Sabha polls as he is the Congress chief in the state. Moreover it seems that he wants to spend more time in state politics then at the Centre now.
In his more than four years as president of the Congress in the state, he has toured over a lakh kilometres and tried to boost the morale of party workers which was shaken badly after the party suffered one of its worst defeats in both the Assembly and Lok Sabha polls.
Congress had lost all 25 Lok Sabha seats in Rajasthan in the 2014 elections.
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Sympathy Wave Likely to Bail Out BJP in Ajmer
Ramswaroop Lamba of the BJP is new to politics but has been given the ticket by the BJP to cash in on the sympathy wave after his father’s death and also because the constituency has a large number of Jat votes. Lamba is a Jat.
Raghu Sharma, on the other hand, is not new to politics and has been an MLA from Kekri which falls in Ajmer constituency. He is banking on votes from Muslims, Rajputs and Brahmins among others.
Polarisation at Play in Alwar
Alwar has become a sensitive constituency. Here two Yadavs are contesting elections against each other. The constituency which is dominated by Meo Muslims and Yadavs is likely to witness a tough battle. Alwar has seen crimes by cow vigilantes in the recent past. In November, cow vigilantes shot dead Umar and injured another man in Govindgarh in Alwar district on suspicion of cow smuggling.
In April, Pehlu Khan was beaten to death on suspicion of cow smuggling by vigilantes in the constituency.
Meo Muslim voters number around 2.5 lakh in Alwar and might favour the Congress after these incidents and the Yadav votes would be divided between the two. Which party other communities will vote for is difficult to assess.
Gyan Dev Ahuja, a BJP MLA from Ramgarh constituency in Alwar district, is busy playing the Hindu card in the constituency. In a recent statement he has “supported” the killings of so-called cow smugglers, “Mera to sidha sidha kahena hai, gau taskari karoge ya gau kashi karoge to yun hi maroge (I have no hesitation in saying that those involved in cow smuggling will be killed),” he told media persons few days back in Alwar which is seen by political observers as an attempt to woo Hindu voters.
Whatever the outcome of the elections, one thing is sure, they are being watched with keen interest.
(The writer is a Jaipur-based senior journalist and political analyst. He can be reached @anilsharma45. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same)
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