New Delhi: Former Nagaur MP and scion of the politically powerful Mirdha family, Jyoti Mirdha, Monday joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), seemingly dealing a blow to the Congress party months before the assembly election in Rajasthan.
The development comes as a shot in the arm for the BJP, which hopes to use Jyoti to counter its former ally and current Nagaur MP Hanuman Beniwal, a Jat leader who broke with it in 2020 over the controversial farm bills and has since been one of its most vocal critics.
Jyoti, a Jat leader, is a part of one of the two Mirdha clans in Rajasthan that have been part of the state’s politics since before Independence. The Mirdhas have traditionally been a Congress family but, with the induction of Jyoti, the BJP is looking to better its poll prospects amongst the Jats in Nagaur — the family bastion — as well as western Rajasthan.
While joining the BJP Monday, Jyoti said she felt “suffocated” in the Congress. “I wanted to play an active role in nation-building, but saw no opportunity in Congress. The party has deviated from the path of progress and nation-building. It has been ignoring committed leaders and workers. Like me, many have left Congress as they were feeling suffocated,” she reportedly said.
Political observers say that although it’s yet to be seen how Jyoti changes the BJP’s electoral fortunes in Rajasthan, a prominent Mirdha associating with the party is significant. At the same time, they also point out that the family’s influence over the Jats in the Merwara region has been waning since the death of Jyoti’s grandfather Nathuram Mirdha in 1996.
Young Jats in Merwara used to rally around Nathuram Mirdha, a six-time MP and a popular farmer leader, political analyst Om Saini told ThePrint.
At that time, the local economy was dependent on stone quarrying, and the Jats would usually handle the business of stone polishing and transportation — something that was handed to them by Nathuram.
“Since his death in 1996, the prominence of the Mirdha family started seeing a downslide,” he said. “Most of the family became Delhi elites or elites in their region. Jyoti herself lives in Gurgaon (Gurugram). The ground-level interaction with the Jat community was gone. Slowly, other Jat leaders like Hanuman Beniwal took up that space.”
The Congress itself doesn’t see Jyoti’s departure as much of a loss. After she joined the BJP, Rajasthan Congress chief Govind Singh Dotasra told reporters that he had not seen Jyoti in any party event for the last four years.
“For the last four-and-a-half years, Jyoti Mirdha was not seen in any Congress events. Her mind has changed now. It had changed many days ago. I’ve been Congress state president for three years and she’s not made a single phone call to me. So, I don’t know on what basis she’s saying this (that she feels suffocated),” Dotasra said.
Manish Godha, a political analyst from Rajasthan, also points towards Jyoti’s ‘dismal’ electoral track record.
“The BJP needed a prominent Jat face to counter Hanuman Beniwal (of the Rashtriya Loktantrik Party) who has emerged as the biggest Jat face of Nagaur and western Rajasthan, diminishing the sway of the Mirdhas,” he said. “But her track record for the last two elections has been poor and she has been inactive for a long time, so how she measures up to Beniwal is something we’ll know after the election.”
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Countering Hanuman Beniwal
Jats constitute 14 percent of Rajasthan’s population. Jyoti won the 2009 Nagaur Lok Sabha polls on a Congress ticket but lost the next election in 2014 — a time when the BJP rode to power with an overwhelming majority.
She faced defeat again in the next general election in 2019 to Hanuman Beniwal, then with the NDA. But since then, Beniwal has distanced himself from the BJP. The party hopes to reverse this loss through Mirdha.
“In the last few by-polls, Hanuman Beniwal fielded candidates that cut into the BJP’s Jat votes,” political analyst Godha, quoted earlier, told ThePrint. “The Jats haven’t been a strong BJP vote bank, and they (the party) need to work on strengthening their Jat base.”
Despite her poor electoral record, analysts believe Jyoti cannot be dismissed. She had one of the highest voting percentages polled by a Congress candidate in Rajasthan both in 2014 and 2019 — 33.77 and 39.74 percent votes. She was also known to be close to Rahul Gandhi.
Rajasthan Congress spokesperson Jaswant Gurjar doesn’t find her switching over to the BJP surprising given that her mother-in-law Krishna Gehlawat — a former Haryana minister in the Congress government — is now with the BJP.
“Jyoti Mirdha was not very active, and she’s also related to the BJP through her in-laws. Additionally, she has a lot of businesses and she may have been apprehensive that the BJP may put a spanner in the works,” he told ThePrint.
He also believes that Congress’s Jat vote bank will remain intact despite Jyoti’s departure. “Our state unit chief is a Jat whereas the BJP removed a Jat state chief (Satish Poonia). This is the BJP’s attempt to do damage control,” Gurjar said.
Sources in the Congress also point to the fact that the party is in touch with Beniwal for his support for the assembly polls as well as the 2024 general election.
Meet the Mirdhas
Rajasthan’s two prominent Mirdha clans, although intertwined politically, are not directly related. But they hold considerable sway over the state’s Jat population.
Jyoti Mirdha’s grandfather Nathuram Mirdha was part of the first Rajasthan assembly in 1952 and also the state’s first finance minister.
The other Mirdha clan descended from Baldev Mirdha, whose son, Ram Niwas Mirdha, was also a part of the first state assembly. Baldev was Nathuram’s political mentor.
According to a member of the family, ‘Mirdha’ was a title and not a surname. But after Independence, people in Baldev Mirdha’s village adopted the name. Nathuram Mirdha was from the same village and, therefore, adopted the title ‘Mirdha’. In the 1940s — right in the middle of India’s freedom movement — Baldev founded the Marwar Kisan Sabha.
“On the eve of the first general election, Pandit Nehru asked Baldev Mirdha to merge the Marwar Kisan Sabha with the Congress. That’s how the Rajasthan Congress came into being,” said the family member.
Nathuram had two sons — Bhanu Prakash and Ram Prakash. According to the Mirdha family member quoted above, the Jat leader had quit the Congress twice in his long political career but returned both times.
“In 1977, Nathuram Mirdha won on a Congress ticket in the midst of a Janata Party wave. That’s the power he held. At a time when the Congress lost everywhere, he won his seat,” political analyst Manish Godha said.
After Nathuram’s death in 1996, the Congress decided to go with Ram Niwas Mirdha instead of his son Bhanu Prakash in the by-election held the next year. Bhanu Prakash fought, and won, on a BJP ticket.
Jyoti Mirdha is the daughter of Nathuram’s other son Ram Prakash. Her sibling, Hemsweta alias Shweta Mirdha, is married to Congress MP Deepender Hooda. Jyoti, on the other hand, is married to Narender Gehlaut, the brother of Indiabulls founder Sameer Gehlaut.
Meanwhile, Ram Niwas’s son, Harendra Mirdha, is a five-time MLA and a former minister in the Congress-led Rajasthan government between 1998 and 2004. After he was denied a ticket in the 2013 assembly election, he contested, and lost, as an Independent candidate. His decision led the Congress to expel him, but he was reinducted in 2015.
In 2019, the Congress fielded Harendra in the Khinwsar bypoll after the sitting MLA — Hanuman Beniwal — was elected to the Lok Sabha. He lost that election as well.
Harendra’s son, Raghuvendra Mirdha, is also with the Congress.
The only elected member from both the Mirdha families now is Vijaypal Mirdha, Nathuram’s grandnephew who is the Congress MLA from Degana in Nagaur. His father and Nathuram’s nephew Richpal Mirdha was a four-time MLA from Degana.
In the 1998 assembly election, Richpal Mirdha quit the Congress and contested independently after being denied a ticket, winning the seat with the highest margin for any independent candidate that year. In 2003, he came back to the Congress and contested — and won — his last assembly election.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)