In Sardarpura bastion, Rajasthan CM Gehlot’s clout overrides BJP’s charge
Chief minister Ashok Gehlot is aiming for a sixth term as legislator in the upcoming assembly elections in Rajasthan.
Jodhpur: The Mahamandir lane in the heart of Sardarpura twinkles with colourful lights to celebrate Diwali. Sixty-year-old Jagdish Sambhariya is one of the many people meandering through the quaint pathways of Jodhpur’s walled city, its festivity masking the political fervour of the crucial assembly elections in Rajasthan, scheduled for November 25. But Sambhariya has another explanation for why the political debates are limited. “Across the state, people [vote] for their legislators. But here, in Sardarpura, we vote for the chief minister,” Sambhariya says.
Jodhpur, and Sardarpura, have for long been identified with one man. It is from the Jodhpur Lok Sabha seat that chief minister Ashok Gehlot was a five-time member of Parliament between 1980 and 1998. He then switched to state politics, and has been an MLA from Sardarpura five times, including his three term as the chief minister. For the past two Lok Sabha elections, in the middle of a BJP wave that has swept through the Hindi heartland, Union minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat has represented the parliamentary polls, but at the state level, Gehlot’s influence is clear. In 2008, he beat the BJP candidate by 15,500 votes, a number that increased to 18,478 in 2013. But in the 2018 elections, his scale of victory rose to 45,597 votes.
Five years later, he is again in the fray from Sardarpura, aiming for a sixth term as the legislator. When asked if there are some murmurs of his unavailability as a legislator, Sambhariya said: “Our MLA, the chief minister himself, looks after his constituency and no work ever stops. But he does have to look after an entire state. But his efforts are visible, from Chiranjeevi health insurance to inflation relief camps.”
Jodhpur, once the capital of Marwar, its landscape pockmarked with palaces, forts and temples, is teeming with age-old customs. One of them, is hathai, essentially a daily meeting point where people from the neighbourhood gather every evening and discuss the world around them. One such group, sitting in the fading light in the Badla area of the constituency is close to unanimous in its opinion. Hardev Ram Bishnoi, an advocate says, “Here, very often, not just Congress but even BJP workers vote for Gehlot.”
There is appreciation for the litany of schemes the Gehlot government has announced, and the development in Jodhpur over the years. “Jodhpur as a district has institutes like IIT, AIIMS, a police and law university and an NIFT. My vote is for development,” another man sitting next to Bishnoi said.
But BJP workers in the city said they have a new-found confidence of putting up a serious challenge, particularly because the fresh candidate against Gehlot is Mahendra Singh Rathore, former chairperson of the Jodhpur Development Authority. “Our organisation is strong at the ground level. There will be a contest because Rathore has done some proven work as chairperson,” Ashok Khinchi, BJP councillor from ward number 50 in Sardarpura, said. Despite the area being part of the chief minister’s constituency, there was work to be done on roads and sewerage, he added.
BJP candidate Rathore said, “Every election has its own perceptions. When this government came to power, they promised an unemployment allowance and jobs, but those haven’t been fulfilled. It has failed to protect women, indulged in corruption, has not curbed paper leaks and have only done appeasement. We will fight the elections on the achievements of the Modi government, and I am confident that our workers will lead us to a win.”