In BJP and Congress’s three-decade Rajasthan duopoly, no space for a third wheel

In recent months, JJP leaders, including Haryana Deputy Chief Minister Dushyant Chautala, have made it clear that the party wants an alliance with the BJP in Rajasthan as well. At 10%, Rajasthan has a significant Jat population that the party is eyeing before the elections. The BJP has remained silent on the matter.

The JJP’s task seems cut out and the state’s electoral history provides a reason why. Many leaders — ranging from dissidents from the two parties or outfits from outside the state — have tried to break the BJP-Congress political binary. However, they have seen little success. The Congress held sway through the 1960s and the 1970s. This was the period that saw a lot of movement in the direction of building Opposition forces.

Starting in 1962, the Swatantra Party, led by erstwhile Jaipur royal Gayatri Devi, occupied the post of the principal Opposition party in the Assembly for three successive terms. The party was known for its anti-Congress stance and won 36 and 49 seats in the 1962 and 1967 Assembly elections, making it the largest Opposition party.

After the Congress swept the 1972 Assembly elections and won 145 seats, the Swatantra Party was reduced to just 11 seats. However, it still bagged the highest number of seats among Opposition parties.

The Swatantra Party went on to become a non-entity in the state after all of the anti-Congress outfits, including the BJP’s predecessor Bharatiya Jan Sangh, merged into the Janata Party and defeated the Congress in the 1977 elections, the first one held after the Emergency.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, various splinter groups of the Janata Party contested elections in Rajasthan, including under the banner of the Lok Dal. They managed to win seats too. It was 1990 that was a defining point. Riding on the anti-Congress wave after the Bofors scandal, the Janata Dal won 55 seats and formed a coalition government with the BJP that had emerged as the single-largest party with 85 MLAs. The coalition was led by Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, who later went on to become the Vice President of India.

This was also the year the BJP withdrew its support from the V P Singh-led Janata Dal government in the Centre after the arrest of L K Advani during the Ram Temple movement. The Janata Dal expected its MLAs in Rajasthan to pull the plug on the Shekhawat government. But dashing any hopes of a Janata Dal-Congress coalition, Shekhawat engineered a split in the Janata Dal, resulting in the emergence of a Janata Dal (Digvijay).

In the 1993 Assembly elections, the Janata Dal (Digvijay) leaders contested on BJP tickets. The Janata Dal could win only six seats that year and later disappeared from the state’s political milieu.

Thus, the stage was set for the Congress-BJP dual polity.

The next major move for a third party would come in 2013 when former BJP MLA and senior politician Devi Singh Bhati floated the Samajik Nyay Manch. But the party could only one seat — his — in the elections.

Kirodi Lal Meena, the biggest tribal leader from Rajasthan, quit the BJP in the late 2000s and joined the National People’s Party (NPP). The NPP did win four seats in the 2013 Assembly elections because of Meena’s influence among his community, but the senior leader was left in the political wilderness. He later returned to the BJP and now is an MP.

Two new political parties were formed ahead of the 2018 elections — senior BJP leader Ghanshyam Tiwari’s Bharat Vahini Party (BVP) formed after he quit the saffron party over differences with former chief minister Vasundhara Raje and the Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (RLP) led by Hanuman Beniwal. The BVP failed to win a single seat, with Tiwari himself losing. The RLP did manage to win three seats, riding on the party’s support among the Jat youth. Five years later, the BVP has disappeared without a trace. After a short stint with Congress, Tiwari has since returned to the BJP and also has a Rajya Sabha seat.

The RLP, however, has contested several by-elections and, at times, has doomed the BJP’s chances by cutting into its vote share.

Beniwal’s party allied with the BJP before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, later broke away from it over the farmer protests. It still has three MLAs and one MP (Beniwal himself from Nagaur) from the state. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which has been active in the state, did win six seats each in the 2008 and 2018 Assembly elections. All its MLAs, however, joined the Congress.