Day-long deliberations and marathon meetings led by BJP National General Secretary (Organisation) BL Santhosh over the Rajasthan urban local body polls underscored the attention the party’s central leadership is paying to an election that would ordinarily be left largely to the state unit.
The deployment is telling: a central observer in former Uttar Pradesh MP Harish Dwivedi, six co-incharges including Maharashtra Revenue Minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule and Delhi Social Welfare Minister Ravindra Indrajit Singh, plus a Maharashtra team headed by former Union minister Kripa Shankar Singh quietly working in far-off Bikaner.
Asked why the party was monitoring the Rajasthan local polls so closely, he said, “We take every election seriously.”
He will kick off this campaign from the southern part of the state, hitting the textile city of Bhilwara on Saturday, followed by a big-ticket roadshow in the scenic City of Lakes, Udaipur. Every party worker, MP and MLA is expected to be on the ground and working at full throttle. For Sharma, the municipal polls are also a test of his government’s record after nearly two-and-a-half years in office.
Chief Minister Sharma has been asked to lead mega roadshows across the state’s 10 important municipal corporations, putting him at the centre of the campaign.
Santhosh’s message, according to those present, was unambiguous: the local body polls are not a lower-rung election in which the state organisation is expected to fight on its own.
Yet, internally, the impact of the Gen Z movement is likely to be assessed through any electoral drift in Rajasthan. The state’s proximity to Delhi adds another layer to that assessment. The CJP, which forced the resignation of the Union Education Minister with its protest at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi in July, has also raised the issue of dilapidated school buildings in Rajasthan, giving the protest a local governance dimension. “This is the first time that the BJP is going into a one-state, one-election situation, in the sense that the urban local body polls and the panchayat polls will be held in quick succession. The intensity of the exercise was perhaps best reflected in the last meeting of the day. Lasting more than two-and-a-half hours, it was a closely guarded meeting between Santhosh, Chief Minister Bhajan Lal Sharma, state BJP president Madan Rathore, Rajasthan in-charge Radha Mohan Das Agarwal, election observer Harish Dwivedi and the newly appointed state general secretary (organisation), Ajey Kumar. The composition of the meeting brought together virtually the entire chain of the party’s organisational and political leadership in Rajasthan.
But a party source who was present at a meeting said the central leadership’s interest in the Rajasthan polls goes beyond the Jantar Mantar protest. Of course, there is the shadow of a big protest that has recently ended, but this is also an opportunity to test a formula that is close to the BJP’s broader electoral strategy,” the source said.
