In June, Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot had said that going into elections this time, the Congress was trying that the tickets be decided two months before polls. However, a week into the declaration of poll dates, even as the party has announced candidates for the four other states headed for elections, the Rajasthan list is awaited. With the first names expected only on October 18, for around 100 seats of the total 200, the vacuum is echoing with talk again of divisions within the fraught state Congress unit. Congress leaders justify the delay saying that the CM himself has been quite busy lately, announcing a spree of schemes and benefits ahead of the model code of conduct. Monday saw the big rally for the Eastern Rajasthan Canal Project (ERCP), which the Congress has accused the BJP government at the Centre of delaying. It was a showcase meeting, attended by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, preparations for which have been on for a while. However, few buy this argument given that at least some names have been announced for Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram. Chhattisgarh, the other state where the Congress is in power, has also been riven with divisions. On Sunday, Gehlot's car was “surrounded” by slogan-shouting party workers in Delhi; the CM was there for talks to select the candidate list. Congress state president Govind Singh Dotasra suggests that the choice of names has been tough as the party received over “3,000 names” for the 200 seats, or an average of 15 applications per constituency. The Congress says they are taking into account Vidhan Sabha and Lok Sabha wise surveys by the AICC, a report by the Pradesh Election Committee (PEC) headed by Dotasra, as well as a survey of possible candidates by a private agency. Dotasra says PEC members went to districts and sought a panel of possible candidates from local leaders, from which names were picked. All this data and the reports were then sent to the Screening Committee, headed by Gaurav Gogoi, with Ganesh Godiyal and Abhishek Dutt as members. Its ex-officio members include Dotasra, Gehlot, AICC Rajasthan in-charge Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa, former deputy CM Sachin Pilot, Assembly Speaker C P Joshi and AICC secretaries in-charge of the state. “The Screening Committee is expected to bring down the names to one-three persons per seat, and submit them to the Central Election Committee (CEC), which will take the final call,” a party leader said, adding that all this was “a time-consuming task”. “For example, we also have to consider the impact of a candidate on the adjacent seats or the region. A candidate may be weak but may positively influence other seats around,” the leader said. Party insiders said that despite talk of more representation to women and youth, and of anti-incumbency against sitting ministers and MLAs, ‘winnability’ remains the dominant criteria. “In several seats, leaders have been MLAs for, say, three-four terms, and have not let a secondary leadership develop. So even if you decide to not repeat them, who else will you give the ticket to?” a party leader said. Moreover, there is pressure on Gehlot to back the MLAs who saved his government twice – during the 2020 rebellion, and then during the September 2022 crisis, when the party high command apparently wanted to replace Gehlot with Pilot as the CM. While the BJP has been first off the mark with a list of 41, Congress leaders say it has declared seats where it wants to “experiment”. “In these 41 seats, it has only one sitting MLA (Narpat Singh Rajvi). Since the experiment included fielding MPs too, the early declaration was intended to give the party enough time to do damage control,” a Congress leader said. Incidentally, what may not help the Congress cause is the fact that Pilot skipped Monday's rally for the ERCP, which concerns 13 districts that include his strongholds. The official reason was that Pilot had to take an exam to qualify from the rank of a Captain to a Major in the Territorial Army and hence he had to be in New Delhi.
