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BJP sweep in Rajasthan

By Sunny Sebastian

JAIPUR, MAY 13. Rajasthan remained an oasis of "feel good'' for the Bharatiya Janata Party in the summer of 2004, with the party romping home with 21 of a total 25 of the Lok Sabha seats. This is an improvement of five seats over the 1999 tally.

This is the highest number of seats the party, which stormed back to power in the State in November 2003, could ever win in Rajasthan.

Amid jubilations elsewhere in the country, a pall of gloom descended on the Congress camp today as all its senior leaders, including the veterans such as Buta Singh (Jalore-SC), Balram Jakhar (Churu), Girija Vyas (Udaipur) and the Pradesh Congress Committee (I) president, Narain Singh (Sikar), fell by the wayside as the saffron team, supported by the Chief Minister, Vasundhara Raje, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, nearly swept the polls.

Curiously, both the winner and the vanquished were grieving today. There were not much visible signs of celebration in the BJP headquarters or at the Indira Gandhi Bhavan, the Congress office.

The BJP leadership was rather shocked at the results at the national level.

"People have reposed their faith in the new Government in the State. The results have come as a reassurance,'' Ms. Raje said confining herself to Rajasthan. On the other hand, the Congress leader, Narain Singh, speaking from Sikar defended himself saying that he had got only five months to rebuild the party.

"There was no issue for the Congress to corner the BJP in the current elections,'' he said.The result is seemingly a continuation of the trend of the Assembly elections for the BJP and the Congress in which the former had bagged 120 of the total 200 seats and the latter 56.

"It is even worse than the Assembly results,'' said the former deputy chief whip of the Congress, Mahesh Joshi. Going by the number of seats won by the Congress, the party has only a share of 32 seats (each Lok Sabha has eight Assembly segments) this time. The BJP's star candidate, Dharmendra, defeated the outgoing Congress MP, Rameshwar Lal Dudi, in Bikaner by a margin of 55,836 votes while Manvendra Singh, son of the outgoing Union Minister, Jaswant Singh, registered his entry into the Lok Sabha by a margin of 2.72 lakh votes.

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