Congress candidate Vivek Dhakad has already won the Mandalgarh assembly seat; party is also leading in Ajmer and Alwar Lok Sabha seats.
New Delhi: In what is seen as a major setback for the Vasundhara Raje-led BJP government in Rajasthan in an election year, the Congress party is set to win all three bypolls — one assembly and two Lok Sabha seats — in the state.
Congress candidate Vivek Dhakad won the Mandalgarh assembly seat by over 12,000 votes defeating the rival BJP candidate. BJP’s Kritikumari had won the seat on 2013 by 19,000 votes defeating Dhakad.
The counting is underway in Ajmer and Alwar Lok Sabha seats, where the Congress has taken a massive lead.
In Ajmer, Congress candidate Raghu Sharma is leading by more than 56,000 votes over the BJP’s candidate Ram Swaroop Lamba.
In Alwar, Congress candidate Karan Singh Yadav is leading by 1.2 lakh votes over the BJP candidate Jaswant Yadav.
During 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the party couldn’t win a single seat of the 25 in Rajasthan.
In 2014, the Congress had lost these two seats by huge margins. While Congress state president Sachin Pilot himself had lost the Ajmer seat by 1.7 lakh votes, former central minister Jitendra Singh had lost Alwar by close to 3 lakh votes.
Under Pilot, the state Congress president, the party has been showing signs of revival after 2014. The Congress has been doing well in the panchayat polls across the state over last three years.
However, a Lok Sabha and assembly seat win is likely to boost the morale of party workers ahead of the assembly polls due later this year.
Both the BJP and the Congress have extensively campaigned in the Lok Sabha constituencies treating it as a semi-final before the assembly polls due this year and general elections in 2019.
“The result is a trailer for the upcoming elections in the state,” senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel told ThePrint.
The bypolls were a prestige battle for both BJP and the Congress and the parties roped in a battery of top leaders during the campaign.
Chief minister Vasundhara Raje had herself campaigned in all the constituencies besides a number of ministers who were stationed in all three places to ensure victory for the party candidate.
Within a year of Ms Raje returning to power, a Marwari friend had told me that resentment was building up. Rajasthan is lost. The greater worry for the party should be Madhya Pradesh, led by a sagacious CM, where too anti incumbency is strong. For the Lok Sabha, in the contiguous states where the BJP had almost maxed out, 30 – 40 % of the seats will go to the Congress, impacting Mission 272. If these by polls are reflective of a larger mood, any rush to prepone the election needs to be reconsidered, keeping in mind the precedent of 2004.