In Rajasthan’s Sardarpura seat, Ashok Gehlot faces off against the BJP’s Rajput “martyr”

For several years, Mahendra Singh Rathore had been appealing to the Bharatiya Janata Party leadership, seeking a ticket in the Rajasthan elections. This year, he did not have to ask. The party’s core committee offered him the ticket from the Sardarpura seat, in Jodhpur district. This was a key seat in Rajasthan, which goes to polls on 25 November. Rathore is competing against the incumbent chief minister, Ashok Gehlot, who is contesting the seat for the sixth consecutive time since 1998, when he was named chief minister and won the Sardarpura bypoll. Gehlot has not lost the seat since.

Rathore has served as the chairman of the Jodhpur Development Authority and is a professor at the Jai Narayan Vyas University. I met him after he had finished speaking at a Ravana Rajput Samaj gathering in Sardarpura, attended by over two hundred and fifty members of the Ravana Rajput community. During his address, he claimed that the Gehlot government had offered “Rooh Afza” to certain communities—a reference to Muslims and an evident attempt at characterising the Congress government’s policies as appeasement. “We are ignored because we are sanatan dharmi”—followers of sanatan dharma, or Hindu tenets.

I asked him what made him a suitable candidate for the seat. “I am a man of sangathan,” he told me—a man of the cadre. He said he had not asked for a ticket this time. Union minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat was rumoured to be the BJP candidate in the Sardarupura seat, until Rathore was named in the party’s third list. In the 2019 general election, Shekhawat had defeated Gehlot’s son, Vaibhav Gehlot, by 2.79 lakh votes in the Jodhpur parliamentary seat. I asked Rathore why Shekhawat was not nominated. “Gajendra Singh Shekhawat is the leader of the state. He is going to different parts of the state talking about the policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” Rathore told me. “BJP ekjut ho kar election lad rahi hai”—the BJP is united in fighting the election. 

Both supporters of Rathore as well as Congress workers did not see Rathore as a quintessential politician. I heard terms such as “karyakarta,” or worker, and “sanghathan se juda aadmi,” a man connected to the cadre, being used to described him. Congress party workers I spoke to classified Rathore as a fig-leaf candidate. “Kisiko toh shaheed hona padega”—Someone will have to be martyred, Ramesh Borana, the in-charge of Gehlot’s election strategy in Jodhpur, said. “The BJP had to send someone out to lose, because no one else agreed to fight.” He added, “I know Rathore, he is a good man. He is a professor, and not a politician. His ideology is in tune with that of RSS-BJP and that’s how he is there.”  

The day’s Dainik Jagran lay on Borana’s table, in his district office in Paota. The front page was a full-page advertisement for the BJP, with Modi’s picture prominent at the top. The ad was titled, “Modi ki guarantee” and promised the implementation of various welfare policies such as the Gareeb Kalyan Yojana, LPG subsidy, and scooties and laptops for students who graduate the twelfth standard. A Congress worker sitting next to me commented, “Will PM will be the CM?”

The question of the chief ministerial candidate has plagued the BJP this election—risking its own campaign, the party has campaigned in the name of Modi and visibly sidelined former chief minister Vasundhara Raje, who does not enjoy the approval of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The Sardarpura constituency, meanwhile, reportedly prides itself on giving the state a chief minister. 

Another factor in Rathore’s nomination is his Rajput identity. The event he was addressing in Jodhpur was a meeting of the Ravana Rajput community. The Ravana Rajputs see themselves as distinct from the dominant upper-caste Rajput community. The community comprises descendants of Rajput men and non-Rajput women, and were historically oppressed by Rajputs. They are notified under Other Backward Classes in Rajasthan. People I spoke to go gave me differing estimates for the number of Ravana Rajput voters in Sardarpura, but Rathore said that, in his calculation, the Rajputs and the Ravana Rajputs together accounted for sixty thousand votes.

The BJP has been making some efforts to court the Ravana Rajputs, and to unite them with the Rajputs. Rathore has some purchase with the community. As the head of the Jodhpur Development Authority, in 2018, he had had a statue of Thakur Dalpat Singh Shekhawat built in the city. Dalpat Singh, a Ravana Rajput, was a British Indian Army officer. He came to be known as the “Hero of Haifa” for fighting in World War I and capturing the crucial Port of Haifa, in present-day Israel, from the Ottoman Army. He was killed during the battle. Modi and his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, honoured Dalpat Singh during the former’s visit to Israel in 2017.

At the Sardarpura meeting Rathore was addressing, members of the community congratulated him for building the statue. Some attendees said they would unite with the Rajputs to defeat Gehlot and bring the BJP to power.

Ravana Rajputs in other parts of the state, however, have expressed discontent with the BJP and the Congress. At a meeting in Bhilwada, members of the community demanded 15 tickets from both parties in the assembly elections, to acknowledge their presence and population in the state. They declared that they would protest and fight as independent candidates if their demands were not met. There are a handful of Ravana Rajputs in the fray this election—in Bhilwada, the BJP has nominated the MLA Jabbar Singh Sankhala from Asind constituency, and the Congress has nominated Manisha Panwar from Jodhpur city. 

A former national youth president of the Ravana Rajput Samaj, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, said that while the community was pleased with Rathore for building the statue of Dalpat Singh, it also appreciated Gehlot’s understanding of their status and his welfare work. “Ashok Gehlot is different in his approach compared to the BJP. He recognises the backward Ravana Rajputs as distinct from Rajputs. He is OBC himself,” the youth leader told me. Gehlot hails from the non-dominant Mali caste, which is notified as OBC.

The youth leader criticised Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, who is Rajput, as “stubborn.” “He tells the high command that all Rajputs are one, which is not correct,” the youth leader told me. He said that the community had also approached Vasundhara Raje, and expressed their demand for recognition as separate from Rajputs.

Members of the Ravana Rajput Sabha cited Gehlot’s welfare promises as his most appealing planks, especially his promises on pensions. Gehlot has promised to increase pensions from Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,500 in the state if the Congress returns to power, and to pressure the centre on reinstating the Old Pension Scheme as well as to make OPS a law in Rajasthan. While the OPS guaranteed a pension equivalent to 50 percent of the salary to all government employees, under the new pension scheme, employee pensions were linked to a corpus pension fund maintained by the government. Government employees across the nation had protested the change, as they felt the OPS was more secure. “Several Ravana Rajputs are government workers, semi-government workers who are likely to benefit from this,” an attendee of the Ravana Rajput Sabha in Jodhpur city told me. “So it is a big factor to bring them Ravana Rajput votes.” Others I spoke to in Sardarpura, both residents and political workers, also brought up the OPS as a key issue.

Elections in Rajasthan are famously decided by the anti-incumbency factor, with the BJP and the Congress switching power every term for the last three decades. But Gehlot’s supporters did not seem worried. Govind Singh Rathore, a Gehlot supporter I met in Sardarpura, used a metaphorical anecdote that was meant to answer whether the chief minister would be able to break the trend of flipping governments in the state. He claimed that he had seen Gehlot do magic tricks. “He would use a match box with a horse image on one side, and blank on the other. After he juggled it in the air, the horse would appear on both sides,” Rathore said.