Rajput votes at stake in Rajasthan, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat legacy a new front in BJP, Cong battle

It all started last week when all top state BJP leaders, including former CM Vasundhara Raje, state BJP president C P Joshi, Union Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat and Leader of the Opposition Rajendra Rathore, flocked to Khachariyawas, Shekhawat’s ancestral village, to pay their tributes on his death anniversary.

Senior BJP leader and Union Minister Nitin Gadkari too participated in the programme, which was being organised by the saffron party on Shekhawat’s birth centenary year — he was born in 1923.

The BJP invoking Shekhawat led to Congress leader and Rajasthan Food and Civil Supplies Minister Pratap Singh Khachariyawas, who is Shekhawat’s nephew, targeting the former.

“The BJP is now remembering Bhairon Singh ji after 13 years. There is a video from some time towards the end of Bhairon Singh ji’s life that people are sharing today. [In the video] Bhairon Singh ji is saying that the BJP government has perpetrated a scam of Rs 22,000 crore, and he asked Ashok Gehlot to not constitute a commission, but probe this scam. Back then, I was an MLA. You can gauge the anger Bhairon Singh ji had felt at the time,” said Khachariyawas, on the same day the BJP leaders had converged at the village.

Khachariyawas added that while cremating the deceased leader 13 years ago, then Vidhyadhar Nagar BJP MLA Narpat Singh Rajvi — Shekhawat’s son-in-law — had got into a game of one-upmanship with him, wanting to carry out Shekhawat’s last rites at the Chandpole crematorium, while he [Khachariyawas] was busy convincing then CM Gehlot to allocate land where Shekhawat’s memorial stands today. Khachariyawas said this after paying tributes to his uncle at the memorial in Jaipur’s Vidhyadhar Nagar.

With his father Laxman Singh — the youngest of the Shekhawat siblings — at his side, the Congress leader asked why the BJP leaders had to go to their ancestral village to pay their tributes, instead of doing so at the memorial in Jaipur. “Those who never supported Bhairon Singh ji during his last days are today doing drama of being his devotees. Today they’ve gone to Khachariyawas village because they didn’t want to face Pratap Singh Khachariyawas, who is standing here [at the memorial],” said the minister.

“Today’s BJP is not Bhairon Singh ji’s BJP. Today’s BJP is all about lies and fraud, and doesn’t tell the truth. When Bhairon Singh ji was alive, and even after he had died, BJP leaders never went to our village to pay their respects. They have gone today because elections are scheduled within 7-8 months,” he charged.

If the Congress leader accused the BJP of forgetting Shekhawat, the former Vice President’s grandson Abhimanyu Singh Rajvi, the son of BJP MLA Narpat Singh Rajvi, launched a scathing counter-attack on the Congress leader, who is also Abhimanyu’s uncle.

“When in a political family, the number of politicians goes up and ideologies become different, it is natural that there will be a difference of opinion. But when one lowers the level of discourse to fulfil his political interest, it requires a reply. Khachariyawas said the family had wanted to cremate Bhairon Singh ji at Chandpole, and it was on his request that Gehlot Sahab allotted the land for the memorial. But this is a complete lie. My father and I had held talks with the then CM for the land allotment. He [Khachariyawas] is trying to appropriate credit,” Abhimanyu told a press conference.

Khachariyawas, who was the president of Rajasthan University Students’ Union in the early 1990s, began his political career in the BJP, and had even headed the saffron party’s youth wing in the state. Later, he joined the Congress and unsuccessfully contested the 2004 Lok Sabha elections from Jaipur on the party’s ticket.

While Khachariyawas may claim to be the inheritor of Shekhawat’s legacy, he had already joined the Congress when, in 2007, the Congress had levelled corruption charges against Shekhawat while the latter fought the presidential election against the UPA candidate Pratibha Patil. By the time Shekhawat died, Khachariyawas was already a Congress MLA.

“Let alone family members, not even an enemy would make such claims as the lies propagated by Pratap Singh Khachariyawas ji today, standing at the sacred Samadhi Sthal of Bhairon Singh ji,” said Abhimanyu, rubbishing Khachariyawas’s allegation that Shekhawat had demanded a probe into the 2003-2008 Raje government’s alleged corruption.

Abhimanyu said the allegation of corruption against the Raje government was actually levelled by the Congress, and Shekhawat had merely said that if such corruption had really taken place, the government should take action on it.

To this day, Shekhawat remains the Rajput community’s biggest leader from Rajasthan. Rajputs, who claim to make up 11-12% of Rajasthan’s population, are spread across the state, with at least some presence in all of its 200 Assembly seats. Traditionally, they have been BJP voters, and known to influence the outcome on many seats.

But the political equations had changed before the 2018 state polls, when several factors had turned the community against the then Raje government, including the police encounter of gangster Anandpal Singh, sidelining of late BJP leader Jaswant Singh, and police cases against Rajput leaders after some protests had turned violent.

The Rajput Sabha — the apex community platform of Rajputs — had in fact started the “Kamal ka phool, hamari bhool (Lotus flower is our mistake)” campaign before the 2018 elections, which the BJP had lost.

In his later years, Shekhawat, who was instrumental behind suggesting Raje’s name as the BJP’s face in Rajasthan, was among a group of senior leaders including former Union minister Jaswant Singh, who felt sidelined by her.

Before the Assembly elections slated for December this year, the BJP is trying to regain their lost ground among Rajputs. By celebrating Shekhawat’s association with the party, it hopes to remind the community of his tall status within the BJP.