New Delhi: A drove of senior party leaders in Barmer, the reinduction of former MP Manvendra Singh, a concentrated campaign — the BJP is pulling out all the stops to “save” the Barmer Lok Sabha seat of Rajasthan, currently held by Union minister Kailash Choudhary and which the party has won three times previously.
The looming threat is BJP rebel Ravindra Singh Bhati, aged just 26, who is in the fray as an independent candidate.
A Rajput leader, Bhati won the 2023 Rajasthan state election from Sheo constituency and is immensely popular in the state. He had quit the BJP when he was denied a ticket ahead of the assembly polls last year and fought alone.
Bhati’s candidature from Barmer has already created a buzz in western Rajasthan as it has come about after failure of rapprochement efforts between him and the BJP. According to party sources, while Bhati was demanding a ticket for the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP picked Choudhary as its Barmer candidate.
The third key contender on the seat is the Congress’s Ummeda Ram Beniwal.
The BJP is now working overtime to convince Barmer, which borders Pakistan and is of strategic interest, to vote for Choudhary.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Rajasthan Chief Minister Bhajanlal Sharma as well as a dozen state ministers are all campaigning in the constituency. The BJP has further inducted late party leader Jaswant Singh’s son Manvendra Singh — an influential Rajput leader — and poached Bhati’s loyalists to improve its prospects in the constituency, party sources said.
Manvendra joined the party Friday at Modi’s rally in Barmer where the PM started his speech by remembering Jaswant Singh, a tall Rajput leader from Rajasthan who rose to prominence in India.
Ten years ago, the BJP had expelled Jaswant Singh, who was one of its founding members and also the finance, defence and foreign minister of India, after he had contested as an Independent from Barmer in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
On 1 April, Shah had visited Jodhpur for a meeting of the core committee of four Lok Sabha seats and asked Rajasthan BJP leaders to focus on Barmer as its “report was not encouraging”.
Speaking to ThePrint, a BJP functionary said that soon after Shah’s meeting, “Rajasthan election in-charge Vinay Sahasrabuddhe was asked to camp in Barmer and concentrate on winning the seat”.
“He travelled by helicopter in a last-minute rush from Delhi to hold meetings with district leaders and finetune the strategy for Barmer after Shah’s displeasure,” he added.
Since then, not only has the BJP ramped up its organisational machinery but brought out senior leaders and stars for the Barmer campaign, including deputy CM and Dalit leader Prem Chand Bairwa, other deputy CM Diya Kumari and cinema star Sunny Deol, to reach out to every caste and community.
CM Sharma camped for two days in Barmer and requested community leaders to support Choudhary and make Modi win the general elections for the third time.
BJP sources said the CM had held a meeting with Bhati in March to influence him to not contest the elections but it did not work out, as Bhati told Sharma that the Rajasthan government had sanctioned two handpumps in the last four months for his assembly constituency while it was promptly fulfilling the demands of Swaroop Singh Khara, the BJP candidate he had defeated from Sheo.
“My big achievement is two handpumps which were sanctioned in the last four months by the state government. It is an achievement that has brought all BJP leaders to Barmer. I will fight for my people who elected me despite me being rejected by parties. My aim is not to grab power, unlike other candidates. I belong to a low-profile family and will raise the issues of poor people,” Bhati told ThePrint.
A senior political expert from Rajasthan, Tribhuvan, said that Bhati was going to give a good fight to the BJP.
“Manvendra Singh had won the Barmer seat because of his image of a secular politician and he was popular among both Muslims and Hindus. Ravindra Bhati is getting traction among Muslims and Rajputs. The Jat vote can get divided as two candidates (Choudhary and Beniwal) belong to the caste. Bhati is leading a good fight while the BJP’s plus point is its management and organisation,” he told ThePrint.
BJP’s Rajya Sabha MP Madan Rathore, who has been asked to camp in Barmer, told ThePrint that “Bhati’s candidature will not impact the BJP’s prospects” on the seat.
“Bhati came under pressure of his ambition to contest the Lok Sabha polls. He was our man but lacked maturity to wait for his turn. He should have served as an MLA for five years,” he said.
“The election is about PM Modi and not of any individual. People also know that the Lok Sabha election is to select the prime minister,” he added.
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Who is Ravindra Singh Bhati
Ahead of the 2023 Rajasthan polls, Bhati was denied a ticket by the BJP and it picked Barmer district president Khara as its Sheo candidate. Bhati then chose to fight the election as an Independent and won handsomely. Khara stood fourth in the results while Congress’s veteran MLA Ameen Khan stood third against 26-year-old Bhati.
Since then, Bhati has become a youth sensation in Rajasthan, with many people comparing him to Congress youth leader Sachin Pilot. But unlike Pilot, Bhati has no political background and has risen in politics from a teacher’s family.
He entered student politics in Jodhpur’s Jai Narain Vyas University and earned fame when he won the president’s post as an independent candidate in the 2019 students’ union election. He had then too been refused a ticket by the BJP’s student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP).
Nowadays, Bhati attracts huge crowds in every meeting and rally and is getting crowd-funding support from the public.
A look at Barmer
Barmer constituency is strategically located on the India-Pakistan border and politically considered a Congress bastion. It is also linked with nine-time parliamentarian Jaswant Singh, who was born in Rajasthan’s Jasol village (part of Barmer district) and went on to win three Lok Sabha elections from the state.
Singh was denied a ticket from Barmer in 2014 due to his rivalry with then CM Vasundhara Raje and he rebelled from the BJP to contest the polls independently. However, he lost to Congress defector Sona Ram who won on the BJP ticket that year.
Singh’s son Manvendra, who had won Barmer for the BJP in 2004, left the party in 2018 to join the Congress. Manvendra tried to claim the seat again on a Congress ticket in 2019 but lost to Kailash Choudhary. Last year, Manvendra also lost the Rajasthan assembly polls and was reportedly not happy in the Congress, and was waiting for the right time to join the BJP.
The Congress has won Barmer nine times in the last 17 Lok Sabha polls while the BJP has won the seat thrice. Sona Ram won the seat four times — thrice on a Congress ticket and once on a BJP ticket.
BJP candidate Choudhary belongs to the Jat community, which is estimated to make up more than five lakh of voters in Barmer. Congress’ Beniwal, who joined from the Rashtriya Loktantrik Party, also belongs to the Jat community. Bhati is a Rajput, a community which has a sizeable electorate of about 2.5 lakh in Barmer.
Choudhary has been facing backlash on the development front and admitted so at a state rally last week, asking people that that “don’t punish Modiji for my shortcomings”.
A senior Rajasthan BJP leader told ThePrint: “Barmer was a Congress seat because the Congress was in pole position. But we have won it three times now and can’t afford to lose it. The defeat of Choudhary will have many ramifications for state politics as Jats constitute a significant portion of the electorate.”
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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