Passions and tempers may have run high during the Gurjjar community agitation for Scheduled Tribe status in 2007 and 2008, leaving Rajasthan on the edge and more than 70 members of the community dead, but in the Assembly elections that just ended, the community has gained precious little.In reality the representation of the Gurjjar community has decreased by three seats since 2003, after the community got split between three factions and failed to develop a united front. Their tally of six, in fact, is their lowest ever. Not a single Gurjjar candidate won in the districts of Dausa, Tonk, Karauli and Sawai Madhopur, which include 17 constituencies. Other than being split across three factions, the Gurjjars were also isolated in the Assembly elections as other communities consolidated their efforts to vote for any non-Gurjjar candidate. The BJP and Congress, which had seven and two Gurjjar MLAs in the 2003 Assembly elections, got three apiece in 2008. Even Gurjjar leader Atar Singh Bhadana, who was expelled from the BJP for his involvement in the 2007 agitation, lost. He contested the elections on a Congress ticket from Nagar constituency in Bharatpur.“It seems the Gurjjar vote in eastern Rajasthan was neutralised in the elections as most other communities voted against whoever the Gurjjars were voting for,” says Bhadana. A close aide of Colonel Kirori Singh Bainsla, who led both the Gurjjar agitations in 2007 and 2008, rued the community’s defeat. “We believed we would win a few more seats in the Assembly to forward our cause, but that failed. The community was divided between the Congress, BJP and an Independent faction, while other communities voted strategically in each constituency,” he admitted.The Bainsla faction seems to be taking solace from the fact that Gurjjar candidates managed a close second place in most of eastern Rajasthan. Senior Congress leaders grudgingly admit now that they had underestimated former minister and BJP rebel Kirori Lal Meena, who managed to unite the Meena community vote in eastern Rajasthan, where the party suffered heavy losses.The BJP too admits that Meena’s pull left them stunned. “We got the equations horribly wrong and made several errors,” says a senior BJP Gurjjar leader. “Though we expected an anti-Gurjjar sentiment, we did not expect K L Meena’s power to unite the Meena community vote in the region. Though he won three seats, he influenced the outcome in at least 10 constituencies in east Rajasthan.”Still, the BJP fared better than the Congress as they wrested six of the seven seats in Bharatpur district, and all four seats in Dholpur, both which the Congress earlier dominated. The Rajasthan state director of the Centre for Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Sanjay Lodha, who conducted a poll survey for the organisation, believes that the twin Gurjjar agitations actually backfired.“All other communities seemed to unite against the Gurjjar community, fearing they would become too powerful. This, compounded with the fact that there was no united Gurjjar front, led to their defeat,” he said.
