As his bete noire Sachin Pilot would testify, you write off Ashok Gehlot at your peril. Not when you are talking about a three-time CM of India’s largest state, a doughty survivor who’s been Union minister under three PMs – Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and P V Narasimha Rao – and staved off a rebellion in his ranks that would have brought down most governments.
But the ravages of Rajasthan’s latest electoral fight may have left this battle-hardened Congress general’s political career scarred for good, never mind the state’s history of voting out the incumbent every five years.
Gehlot left no sop unadvertised and no freebie unexplored in the run-up to the election. He rolled out welfare schemes and made audacious guarantees, none of which helped Congress buck Rajasthan’s anti-incumbency trend.
So, does Congress’s third consecutive failure to retain the reins of government under Gehlot’s leadership lay the base for the change of guard that Pilot has been fighting for?
Although it isn’t quite the bulwark he would have wanted, the saving grace for Gehlot has been the number of seats (69) Congress has won in the face of a saffron surge. In its previous defeats when he was CM, the party had won significantly fewer seats – 56 in 2003 and 21 in 2013.
For Pilot, waiting patiently in the wings since being removed as deputy CM in 2020 and labelled by Gehlot as “nakara, nikamma and gaddar (worthless and traitor)”, none of this would probably matter. Not just Gehlot, the former PCC chief is also likely to up the ante against the outgoing CM’s loyalist Govind Singh Dotasra, who took over the state party leadership after he was forced to step down.
Insiders say that despite trying to project a semblance of reconciliation in the run-up to the polls, Gehlot’s relationship with Pilot was never on the mend. And now that Congress has been ousted, all of this could come back to haunt him.
Gehlot’s withdrawal from the AICC presidential election in 2022 and the CLP boycott by his loyalists might also go against him, as could his selection of candidates that some say didn’t go down well with the Gandhi family.
But while the 72-year-old finds his worth under scrutiny, trust him not to be cowed down easily. “I think the schemes of the Rajasthan government were all good ones; otherwise, these wouldn’t have been discussed across the country. The poll results have not gone our way in Chhattisgarh and MP too,” he said on Sunday.
But the ravages of Rajasthan’s latest electoral fight may have left this battle-hardened Congress general’s political career scarred for good, never mind the state’s history of voting out the incumbent every five years.
Gehlot left no sop unadvertised and no freebie unexplored in the run-up to the election. He rolled out welfare schemes and made audacious guarantees, none of which helped Congress buck Rajasthan’s anti-incumbency trend.
So, does Congress’s third consecutive failure to retain the reins of government under Gehlot’s leadership lay the base for the change of guard that Pilot has been fighting for?
Although it isn’t quite the bulwark he would have wanted, the saving grace for Gehlot has been the number of seats (69) Congress has won in the face of a saffron surge. In its previous defeats when he was CM, the party had won significantly fewer seats – 56 in 2003 and 21 in 2013.
For Pilot, waiting patiently in the wings since being removed as deputy CM in 2020 and labelled by Gehlot as “nakara, nikamma and gaddar (worthless and traitor)”, none of this would probably matter. Not just Gehlot, the former PCC chief is also likely to up the ante against the outgoing CM’s loyalist Govind Singh Dotasra, who took over the state party leadership after he was forced to step down.
Insiders say that despite trying to project a semblance of reconciliation in the run-up to the polls, Gehlot’s relationship with Pilot was never on the mend. And now that Congress has been ousted, all of this could come back to haunt him.
Gehlot’s withdrawal from the AICC presidential election in 2022 and the CLP boycott by his loyalists might also go against him, as could his selection of candidates that some say didn’t go down well with the Gandhi family.
But while the 72-year-old finds his worth under scrutiny, trust him not to be cowed down easily. “I think the schemes of the Rajasthan government were all good ones; otherwise, these wouldn’t have been discussed across the country. The poll results have not gone our way in Chhattisgarh and MP too,” he said on Sunday.