BJP and Congress flags.
Credit: DH File Photos
Jaipur: Eyeing a repeat of its electoral performance of 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party will look to win all 25 seats in the Lok Sabha polls in Rajasthan, even as the Congress hopes to cause a dent in the saffron party's plans.
Despite losing the Rajasthan assembly elections to the Congress in December 2018, and thus being in the opposition, the BJP had managed to win 24 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, with the only other seat going to its ally Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (RLP).
This time, the BJP is in power in the state and looks to have wind in its sails.
The Congress, which had won a majority of the assembly seats in eastern Rajasthan in the 2018 assembly polls, suffered a bitter loss a few months later in the parliamentary polls.
The Gurjar community had voted for the Congress in the assembly polls, hoping that Sachin Pilot, a member of the community, would become the state's chief minister. When that did not happen, votes for the Congress took a hit and the BJP won all the seats in the region in the Lok Sabha polls.
However, the winning margin was relatively low on three eastern Rajasthan seats as compared to other seats in the state.
In the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP's Jaskaur Meena won from Dausa with a margin of 78,444 votes, while Manoj Rajoria won the Karauli-Dholpur seat with a margin of 97,682 votes. In Tonk-Sawai Madhopur, Sukhbir Singh Jaunapuria won the election with a margin of 1,11,291.
Pilot won his first assembly elections in 2018 from the Tonk assembly seat which comes under the Tonk-Sawai Madhopur Lok Sabha segment.
In the Marwar region, the Congress faced a humiliating defeat from Jodhpur in the parliamentary elections where the then-chief minister Ashok Gehlot's son Vaibhav Gehlot lost to the BJP's Gajendra Shekhawat by 2,74,440 votes.
Jodhpur is Gehlot's hometown and is considered a stronghold of the Congress. The party's loss was a major embarrassment for both Gehlot and the party.
Shekhawat, a union minister, is contesting again from the seat in 2024. He has been a Lok Sabha MP from Jodhpur since 2014.
The BJP had left one seat, Nagaur, for its ally Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (RLP), which is headed by Hanuman Beniwal, in 2019. Beniwal defeated Congress candidate Jyoti Mirdha by a margin of 1,81,260 votes.
Mirdha, who is now in the BJP, has been given the party ticket from Nagaur. The BJP's alliance with the RLP ended over the farmers' protest in 2020.
In the Mewar region comprising the southern parts of the state, Bhartiya Tribal Party, which had emerged just ahead of the 2018 elections, won two assembly seats, causing considerable damage to both the Congress and the BJP particularly in the Banswara and Dungarpur areas.
However, the BJP managed to swing the voters in its favour in the Lok Sabha elections that followed and won by very high margins in Banswara (3,05,464 votes), Chittorgarh (5,76,247), Udaipur (4,37,914 votes) and Rajsamand (5,51,916 votes).
The BJP's assembly performance in the Mewar region, in which it had won many seats, also helped the party increase its winning margin in the Lok Sabha elections.
The party retained its influence in the Hadoti region where it won the Kota-Bundi (Om Birla) and Jhalawar-Baran (Dushyant Singh) seats.
Dushyant Singh, the son of former chief minister Vasundhara Raje, won his seat with a margin of 4,53,928 votes.
In northern Rajasthan (Bikaner, Ganganagar) and the Shekhawati region (Churu, Sikar, Jhunjhunu), the party had won comfortably with margins close to three lakhs in each seat.