Why Gehlot-Pilot truce is crucial for Congress’ victory in Rajasthan Assembly polls

With less than five months remaining before Rajasthan goes to polls, the Congress party’s central leadership spent nearly four hours, on Thursday (July 6), finalising a blueprint for an armistice between Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and Tonk MLA Sachin Pilot. The meeting, chaired by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge at the party’s national headquarters in Delhi, also discussed threadbare palpable organisational weaknesses and lapses of the Gehlot government while drawing out a strategy to urgently address such concerns.

As the discussions ended, the party’s organisational general secretary KC Venugopal exuded confidence over an imminent Congress victory in the assembly polls due this November but underscored that such an outcome can be made possible “provided there is total unity” in the Rajasthan unit.

The caveat was necessary as Gehlot and Pilot, the Congress’s two most prominent satraps in the state, have been engaged in an acrimonious turf war ever since the party assumed power in Rajasthan in December 2018. Pilot’s failed coup against Gehlot in July 2020 had further precipitated the rivalry, which, over the past three years, repeatedly played out in public as both leaders sniped at each other with scant regard to the perceptible damage that this was causing to the Congress.

Also read: Fresh hiccups for Cong amid buzz on Pilot’s ‘move’ to quit, launch new party

Several attempts by the Congress high command to rein in the two leaders had failed. On May 29, Kharge, alongwith former Congress president Rahul Gandhi, had summoned both Gehlot and Pilot to Delhi in a bid to broker peace between them. That meeting, like the one held on Thursday, had also lasted nearly four hours following which Venugopal, flanked by Gehlot and Pilot, had announced that all differences between the rivals had been resolved.

Gehlot and Pilot would “fight the election unitedly” and “win the state”, Venugopal had declared on May 29. Details of the peace deal worked out by the Congress high command were not made public and within days, speculations that Pilot would quit the party on June 11, the death anniversary of his father and Congress stalwart, late Rajesh Pilot, had plunged the party into another crisis. Though Pilot left the rumourmongers disappointed, he also made it clear to the party that he would keep raising uncomfortable questions for the Gehlot government if his demands were not met.

Pilot’s 3 demands

On Thursday, Congress sources say, Pilot finally succeeded in getting the party high command to read the riot act to Gehlot, albeit gently. His barely veiled political ambition to replace Gehlot as the Rajasthan chief minister aside, Pilot had been pushing the party leadership to make Gehlot accept three demands. These were: a time-bound high-level inquiry into the alleged corruption of the previous Vasundhara Raje-led BJP state government, dissolution of the existing Rajasthan Public Service Commission (RSPC) and its reconstitution and adequate disbursal of compensation to students who couldn’t sit for various government-conducted exams owing to frequent exam paper leaks.

Also read: Desert storm awaits Cong? Buzz over Pilot’s next move ahead of Assembly polls

Pilot told reporters after Thursday’s meeting that the party high command had accepted the three demands and asked Gehlot to work on a blueprint to address them. Venugopal conceded that the chief minister had been instructed to carry out wide-ranging reforms in the RSPC, including its reconstitution, and that a new legislation to put these into effect would be brought to the Rajasthan Assembly for passing very soon.

Venugopal also acknowledged that frequent leaks of examination papers was “a big issue” and that the Gehlot government was ready with a new law, to be brought before the Rajasthan Assembly in its forthcoming session, under which “big punishment (sic) will be given to those who are guilty of question paper leakage”.

On Pilot’s third demand regarding expeditious investigations into alleged corruption of the erstwhile Vasundhara Raje-led BJP government, the party still remained non-committal. Neither Venugopal nor Pilot directly addressed the issue after Thursday’s meeting. However, party sources told The Federal that Gehlot had already informed the Congress high command that he was initiating steps, including the possibility of a time-bound inquiry into these allegations, to address this concern too.

 Gehlot praised and pulled up

For Pilot and other detractors of Gehlot, there were also other reasons to draw satisfaction from Thursday’s meeting. A senior Rajasthan Congress leader who was present at the meeting told The Federal that though the chief minister came in for fulsome praise from Kharge and Rahul for his government’s welfare and populist schemes, the deficiencies in his administration as well as complaints of a growing rift between the government and the party workers were also discussed at length.

Also read: Rajasthan: Congress’s desert storm blows over as Gehlot, Pilot sing unity tune

Besides Kharge, Rahul, Venugopal and the party’s in-charge for the state, Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa, there were 29 leaders from the state, including Pilot, in attendance at the meeting while Gehlot, recovering from a toe-fracture, had logged in virtually. A senior minister in the Rajasthan government who was present at the meeting told The Federal, “Gehlot was praised but he was also pulled up… Rahul may not have directly backed Pilot on the issue of the government’s inaction on corruption cases against Vasundhara Raje but he did tell Gehlot that corruption by anyone cannot be tolerated and the government cannot be seen as indecisive or unwilling to act strongly in such cases”.

Another leader present at the meeting said it was Kharge who gave Gehlot no quarter at the meeting. The Congress president reportedly told the chief minister rather bluntly that his government had failed to check rising instances of crimes against Dalits, tribals and religious minorities in the state – an issue that several civil rights activists have repeatedly red-flagged in recent months.

Kharge, sources said, made it known that while Gehlot, as the state’s chief minister, should be answerable to the criticism over rising hate crimes and caste-violence in Rajasthan, as Congress president, it is he (Kharge) who is repeatedly asked to respond on such matters. When Gehlot said action was taken whenever such cases were brought to his attention, Kharge is learnt to have quipped, “kaal kare so aaj kar, aaj kare so ab, pal mein parlay hoyegi, bahuri karega kab’, a popular Kabir couplet meant to stress on the need for prompt action instead of procrastination.

 Rahul asks Gehlot to bridge rift between voters and party

Sources said that though Rahul did not dwell long on what Kharge said, he pointed out that Dalits, tribals, religious minorities and backward classes were traditional Congress supporters and the party’s government cannot be seen as turning a blind eye to their concerns. The former Congress chief, an AICC office bearer present at the meeting told The Federal, also backed Pilot and Baytu MLA Harish Chaudhary’s claim that ordinary party workers in the state, particularly those from oppressed communities and religious minorities, had been feeling alienated from the Gehlot administration.

Rahul is learnt to have told Gehlot and his loyalist, Rajasthan Congress chief Govind Singh Dotasra that urgent steps need to be taken to bridge the rift between voters and the party. That the Congress was, indeed, worried about reports of voter alienation was evident in Venugopal’s announcement that over the next 90 days, beginning Friday (July 7), “our ministers, MLAs, leaders, workers plan to undertake a house-to-house campaign for propagating government’s schemes and achievements”.

Also read: Rajasthan Congress incharge says Gehlot will respond to Pilot’s ultimatum

This door-to-door campaign, party sources said, is meant to compliment the ‘Mehngai Rahat Camps’ that Gehlot had launched in May in a bid to ensure that intended beneficiaries of his government’s welfare schemes are not only informed about their entitlements but also encouraged to enrol for the schemes for which they are eligible. A senior Rajasthan Congress functionary told The Federal that though Gehlot’s pro-poor schemes had drawn wide acclaim from common voters and rights’ activists alike, surveys conducted by the party had indicated that the beneficiaries did not credit the party for these programs as many weren’t aware whether these were centrally-sponsored by the Narendra Modi-led BJP government or state-funded.

The issue of anti-incumbency

Sources say a considerable amount of time was spent discussing challenges arising out of anti-incumbency against the Congress in Rajasthan. Being a state that has a three-decade history of voting out incumbent governments every five years, the Congress leadership realises that checking anti-incumbency is paramount to its ambition of breaking this cyclical trend. Surveys conducted by the party, thus far, to assess its poll prospects have indicated that many of its incumbent MLAs, including some key ministers, are extremely unpopular in their constituencies owing to various reasons. However, denying many of these MLAs a ticket would run the risk of them sabotaging the party’s election campaign.

Besides, since the party is also deeply polarised between factions led by Gehlot and Pilot, there is also a realisation that the two leaders would rather push for tickets for an unpopular candidate loyal to them than concede the seat to a potentially winning candidate from the rival camp. Venugopal told reporters that the party is “conducting several surveys” and the “only basis” for giving tickets to candidates would be their winnability. The party knows that this is easier said than done and has decided that, like for the Karnataka assembly polls, it would declare a bulk of its candidates well in advance so that any internal turmoil that the candidate selection process may trigger can be addressed in time.

Also read: Graft charges: Congress leaders back Gehlot; Sachin Pilot remains firm

Venugopal said that the party aims to decide its candidates “by the first week of September”, which would be even before the Election Commission announces the schedule for assembly polls to be held simultaneously in Rajasthan, MP, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram. Sources said that at discussions previously held by Kharge to oversee poll preparedness in MP, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram, it was similarly decided to announce a bulk of candidates well in advance.

In the case of Rajasthan, sources said the party is likely to announce candidates for 80 to 100 of the state’s 200 seats by early-September. These would largely include those seats where popular sitting MLAs would be repeated, a number of seats that the Congress lost very narrowly to the BJP in the 2018 assembly polls and also candidates in constituencies where Gehlot and Pilot don’t have competing loyalists in the fray.

However, the big question of who will lead the election campaign is something that the Congress remains unwilling to answer. The party has maintained that it doesn’t typically announce its chief ministerial candidate and would go into the polls under a collective and united leadership. The Congress high command clearly doesn’t wish to endorse either Gehlot or Pilot as the chief ministerial candidate ahead of the polls as choosing one over the other would most certainly reignite their turf war. It is clear, though, that Gehlot will continue as chief minister till the elections while Pilot may soon be given a plum role in the party organisation, which is headed for a major revamp later this month.

What most in the party have still been left wondering, like they were on May 29, is how long would this fresh lease of forced truce between Gehlot and Pilot last.