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The fate of several ministers of the Ashok Gehlot government continued to hang in the balance as the Congress on Wednesday held lengthy meetings to draw up the list of its candidates for the Assembly elections. In contrast to the other election-going states of Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, Chhattisgarh and Telangana, the party has yet to release its first list of candidates for Rajasthan, which goes to polls on November 25.
The delay, according to sources, is because of serious differences in the party over benching some MLAs, including ministers. Sources said Gehlot was keen on renominating all his ministers. He also wants the party to field all the six former Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MLAs who joined the Congress in 2019, as well as the Independents, most of them former Congressmen, who supported his government during crises.
Congress insiders claimed that the leadership was keen to deny tickets to those who, according to it, have less or little chance of retaining the seats this time. Its assessment is said to be based on internal surveys conducted by poll strategist Sunil Kanugolu’s team. But Gehlot is said to be not in complete agreement with the list of potential candidates identified by Kanugolu’s team. In fact, Gehlot reportedly said at one of the meetings that he knows Rajasthan better than the strategists.
Sources said among those ministers whose fate hangs in the balance are Shanti Kumar Dhariwal, Mahesh Joshi, Govind Ram Meghwal, and Shakuntla Rawat. Dhariwal and Joshi were among the three Congress leaders whom the high command had show-caused last year after a group of MLAs loyal to Gehlot boycotted a Congress Legislature Party (CLP) meeting, precipitating a crisis at a time when there was talk of Gehlot moving to Delhi to become the national president of the party and Sachin Pilot taking over in the state.
The Congress’s Central Election Committee (CEC) met on Wednesday to discuss candidates for around 100 seats but sources said the panel cleared only about half of those seats. The high command, especially Rahul Gandhi, is said to be upset with the screening committee for coming up with single names for the rest of the constituencies. Sources said the central leaders asked the screening committee to come back with the names of at least three probable candidates for each seat. The sense was that the screening committee, which shortlists the probables, could not put up multiple names in the face of stiff resistance from Gehlot and his camp.
Some of the central leaders later wondered whether the CEC’s task was to just “rubber stamp” the names put before it and not apply its mind factoring in the feedback that the party has got from multiple channels, including surveys. Sources said Gehlot was against denying tickets to MLAs and ministers because of corruption charges against them.
Gehlot, before leaving for Delhi on Tuesday, argued that had the MLAs been corrupt they would have taken money offered to them to topple his government in 2020. The two political developments that had rocked the state Congress — Pilot’s rebellion in 2020 and the parallel CLP meeting held by Gehlot camp MLAs — are also now playing out in the candidate selection.
While the CM’s camp believes those MLAs who rebelled against his government should not be renominated, the Pilot camp argues that the same rule, in that case, should apply to those legislators who defied the high command’s direction to hold the CLP meeting. Amid multiple tussles, sources said the party’s first list for Rajasthan could be only of those candidates on whose names there is no disagreement.
