The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party on Tuesday suffered a major setback in Rajasthan, where it lost 11 of the 25 Lok Sabha seats, while the Opposition Congress made impressive gains by winning as many as eight seats. The BJP, which was elected to power in Rajasthan in December 2023 and won all the 25 Lok Sabha seats in the 2014 and 2019 general elections, won 14 seats.
All the three candidates of the INDIA bloc routed the BJP contestants by significant margins. The winners are CPI(M)’s Amra Ram in Sikar, the Rashtriya Loktantrik Party’s (RLP) Hanuman Beniwal in Nagaur and the Bharat Adivasi Party’s (BAP) Rajkumar Roat in Banswara.
Lok Sabha Election results 2024: Highlights
The BJP’s winners include Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla (Kota), Union Ministers Gajendra Singh Shekhawat (Jodhpur), Bhupender Yadav (Alwar) and Arjun Ram Meghwal (Bikaner), and the party’s State president, C.P. Joshi (Chittorgarh). The sitting BJP MPs who lost to the Congress and INDIA bloc candidates included Sumedhanand Saraswati (Sikar), Sukhbir Singh Jaunpuria (Tonk-Sawai Madhopur) and Kailash Chaudhary (Barmer).
The BJP faced defeat in eight of the 12 seats where elections were held in the first phase on April 19. The voting percentage was low in the first phase, leading to speculation that it would impact the results. Among the 13 seats that went to polls in the second phase on April 26, the BJP candidates won in 10 constituencies.
Prominent winners
Prominent among the Congress winners were Rahul Kaswan (Churu), who had switched from the BJP ahead of the election, former Minister Murari Lal Meena (Dausa), Ummeda Ram Beniwal (Barmer), who left the RLP to join the Congress before election, and former Director General of Police Harish Chandra Meena (Tonk-Sawai Madhopur).
The BJP’s Manju Sharma defeated Congress candidate and former Minister Pratap Singh Khachariyawas in Jaipur by a huge margin of 3,31,767 votes. Former Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot’s son Vaibhav Gehlot also suffered a humiliating defeat with a margin of 2,01,543 at the hands of BJP’s Lumba Ram Chaudhary in Jalore. Mr. Vaibhav Gehlot was routed in Jodhpur in the 2019 Lok Sabha election as well.
Other winning candidates of the BJP were former CM Vasundhara Raje’s son Dushyant Singh (Jhalawar-Baran), former Assembly Deputy Speaker Rao Rajendra Singh (Jaipur Rural), Bhagirath Choudhary (Ajmer), former Union Minister P.P. Choudhary (Pali), Manna Lal Rawat (Udaipur), Mahima Kumari (Rajsamand) and Damodar Agarwal (Bhilwara).
While Mr. Amra Ram is the second CPI(M) leader to be elected MP from the State – the first was Sheopat Singh who won in Bikaner in 1989 – RLP supremo Mr. Beniwal won in 2019 as a BJP alliance partner and a member of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). He quit the NDA in protest against the now-withdrawn controversial agriculture laws in 2020.
Mr. Roat’s victory in Banswara, by defeating veteran tribal leader Mahendrajeet Singh Malviya who had shifted from the Congress to the BJP, has depicted the rising influence of newly formed BAP in the tribal-dominated region in southern Rajasthan. The BJP’s rout in the Shekhawati region has been perceived as an indication of discontent over the Agnipath scheme and the Jat farmers’ disenchantment over irrigation waters, land rights, farm loan waiver and minimum support prices.
Caste-based politics also played a major role in several constituencies, where communities such as Jats, Gujjars, Rajputs and Muslims have a significant presence. Despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speeches during his election campaign in the State, in which he accused the Congress of planning to take away private properties from the people and “snatching” reservation from Dalits, there was apparently very little religious polarisation.
BJP State president Mr. Joshi said the Opposition parties had tried to mislead people by raising “irrelevant issues”, because of which the election results had depicted a swing, which was “not expected”. Pradesh Congress Committee president Govind Singh Dotasra said the voters had “corrected the mistake” which they made in the 2023 Assembly election. “The people have realised that the BJP has deceived them. They voted overwhelmingly in support of Congress’s Nyay Patra [manifesto],” he said.
Published - June 04, 2024 11:01 pm IST
