Two Gujaratis vs one Marwari: BJP’s polarising campaign in Rajasthan

Chanting ‘jai shri Ram’ at election rallies, reminding people of the Ram temple and return of ‘Ram rajya’ courtesy Narendra Modi, offering voters a free trip to Ayodhya, and recalling the murder of an Udaipur tailor last year marked the core of the BJP’s campaign in Rajasthan, where polling to elect a new assembly is scheduled for Saturday 25 November. 

The two BJP chief ministers of Rajasthan, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat and Vasundhara Raje, were Atal Behari Vajpayee-mould moderates and liberals. Both knew that communalism was not part of the DNA of Rajasthan, and both knew how to bring communities and castes together. Two more rabid and radical leaders, Gulab Chand Kataria and Lalit Kumar Chaturvedi, opposed Shekhawat and Raje bitterly within the party, but could never rise to become chief ministers.

Did BJP leaders then make a mistake by communalising their campaign in Rajasthan this time? There was no mistaking the party’s pitch, as Prime Minister Modi himself launched his campaign by raking up the murder of a tailor, Kanhaiya Lal, in Udaipur last year. While the accused were arrested within hours by the police, the case was handed over to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) by the Union government, and a charge sheet is yet to be filed. 

Both PM Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah relentlessly harped on the issue, insinuating that the Congress government in the state had allowed the crime to take place. Such was the intensity of the pitch that chief minister Ashok Gehlot had to come out and state that both the accused were close to BJP leaders, including the former mayor of Udaipur, who had intervened and freed them from police custody in another case, weeks before the murder.

Undeterred, the BJP ended the campaign on Thursday by reminding voters that a vote for the Congress would be a vote for ‘terrorists’, a euphemism for Muslims. The BJP, of course, has not fielded a single Muslim candidate and denied a ticket to Yunus Khan, who was twice the transport minister in Vasundhara Raje’s cabinet. In fact, Amin Pathan, former chief of the BJP’s minority cell and head of the managing committee of Ajmer Dargah, quit the BJP and joined the Congress, complaining that the BJP had no programme for the minority community.

BJP leaders, however, continued to attack the Congress for ‘vote-bank politics’ and accused the party of appeasing Muslims. The minuscule Muslim population of around seven million in a population of 70 million-plus, however, can influence the outcome in around 36 assembly seats. The BJP has sought to counter this by fielding three Hindu ‘holy men’ to consolidate the majority votes.

“It is actually a miracle that no communal disturbance or tension was reported from anywhere in the state despite the BJP’s polarising campaign,” says Swarnim Chaturvedi, a PCC general secretary, crediting the chief minister and the administration for controlling the situation despite provocations.

The prime minister has visited the state 13 times in the past few months, and gone to as many temples as he possibly could, invoking gods and goddesses in his speeches and appealing to voters to punish "them" by voting for the BJP. In a shocking incident, he even asked voters to press the button of the EVM as if they were "hanging them". Unsurprisingly, the Election Commission missed serving a notice to the PM for his provocative speech.

While a far more dignified chief minister Gehlot and his former deputy Sachin Pilot refused to respond in kind, appealing to voters to vote for the Congress government and its welfare schemes, BJP leaders left no opportunity to mock both for their alleged inability to work together. The prime minister, in fact, sought to incite the Gurjars by alleging that Congress had been unfair to late Rajesh Pilot and his family and was unfair to Sachin Pilot now by not allowing him to become the chief minister.  

On Saturday, voters will choose between communalism and welfare, between Narendra Modi, who has made the state election all about himself, and Ashok Gehlot.

Typically, Gehlot has had the last word. When he was in charge of the party’s campaign in Gujarat, he recalled, the prime minister would go around saying that a ‘Marwari’ from Rajasthan was campaigning to defeat him, a Gujarati. “What can I do but to remind people that there are two Gujaratis campaigning here to defeat me?”

The counting day on 3 December will show if he has the last laugh.