Former Union Minister CP Joshi doesn’t consider his rival from the BJP, Olympic silver medallist Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore a strong opponent because “he is a shooter, and not a cricketer or Bollywood star” who have a mass following.
“People across India are crazy about cricketers and film stars. But he is a shooter. I appreciate his achievement. However, I am 100 per cent confident of my win,” Joshi told The Pioneer on way from one of his public meetings to the other last week.
Joshi, who had stepped down from the Manmohan Singh Cabinet ahead of the reshuffle last year, is one of the Congress stalwarts in the State trying hard to salvage some pride for his party amid the possibility of a BJP clean sweep aided by the ‘Modi wave’. The former State Congress chief asserted there’s no Modi wave but made sure to trash it at every public meeting he held, a clear indication that it is indeed a factor in Rajasthan and that it weighed heavy on his mind.
“Modi wave is just a creation of his publicity managers. Just as action scenes in films are all unreal, the Modi wave is also unreal,” he said. This is one of the few seats in Rajasthan where a keen contest seems to be on hand, at least, going by the hectic campaign, that ended on Tuesday, the BJP and the Congress undertook for the April 17 polls.
Both Joshi and newcomer Rathore are “outsiders” in this dusty, sleepy Jaipur Rural constituency, interspersed with small villages interlinked mostly by kuccha roads besides a few dilapidated bitumen-layered ones presenting a stark contrast to the neat and well-developed capital of Rajasthan, only 50-60 km away.
Joshi, a close confidant of Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, is the sitting MP from Bhilwara while Rathore hails from Bikaner. Joshi, a Brahmin, is banking on the sizeable voters from his community in the constituency with over 16 lakh electorate. Rathore, a Rajput, is banking both on the Brahmins and his own community.
Rathore covered quite some ground in the last few days — from being an unknown entity to be recognised as the BJP’s candidate. Bansidhar in Nayawas village, Birendra Kumawat in Manoharpur, Ramkrishna Sharma in Surana village and Chiranjilal Sharma in Khora village — they all gave out his full name, “Col Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore”, when asked who the BJP candidate from the seat was.
Political observers said that this is a major turnaround for the former Olympian whom not many knew when he entered the electoral fray. “They only knew Modi,” the observers pointed out. Rathore himself had been seeking votes playing the Modi card insisting that every vote to him would propel the BJP’s PM candidate to power and usher in good governance.
The Congress fielded Joshi from here in place of Union Minister of State for Rural Development lal Chand Kataria, who opted out. Joshi said he chose not to fight from Bhilwara due to his “credibility factor”. “Despite all my efforts and Rs 2,000 crore also sanctioned for the drinking water project which I had promised, it could not be implemented. It was a matter of my credibility,” he stressed.
Joshi was said to be facing a strong anti-incumbency against him in Bhilwara but he asserted he was not “an escapist”.
Rathore has an advantage with BJP MlAs in five of the eight Assembly seats falling under the lok Sabha constituency. Joshi draws strength from the fact that the combined deficit for the Congress in terms of vote was “hardly 50,000”. “In the Assembly polls, there was only a three per cent vote slide for the Congress though the numbers suggest a different story,” he said. There’s also some relief for him since there are Congress MlAs on two seats.
Interestingly, an intense fight was on for the 3 lakh voters in the urban centres of Jhotwara and Amer, just on the outskirts of Jaipur city, in an otherwise rural constituency.
The entry of maverick Meena leader Kirori lal Meena’s National People’s Party in the fray queered the pitch for both the BJP and the Congress, the latter in particular, since its candidate Navin Pilania is expected to cut into the Jat votes on which Joshi too is banking to an extent given that Rathore is a Rajput. A triangular contest, thus, seems to be on hand.