JAIPUR : After days of feverish speculations and tussle over the CM’s chair, which seemingly refused to die down since the party secured a comfortable majority in the Rajasthan assembly elections, the Congress high command eventually veered to old loyalist and warhorse Ashok Gehlot as its choice for CM on Friday and also named state party chief Sachin Pilot as his deputy. Both Gehlot, a two-time chief minister, and Pilot had reportedly been eyeing the chief minister’s throne and had been locked in a power tussle in
the state.
The Congress high command held several rounds of meetings with both leaders, in the wake of the Rajasthan win, before an eventual call on the chief minister was taken. It took party president Rahul Gandhi to broker a truce between the two top state mandarins and settle on an arrangement, placating both. The names of the chief minister and his deputy were announced at a press conference by the All India Congress Committee (AICC) on Friday.
Having been on the pilot seat twice before — between 1998 and 2003 and between 2008 and 2013 — Gehlot is set to take the state’s administrative reins for the third time. However, the tussle for the CM’s throne in Rajasthan is nothing new for the Congress. In fact, it goes back as far as 1952 when a row over the CM choice split state party workers into rival groups. One on the side were supporters of Jai Narayan Vyas, one of the contenders for the throne, and on other were loyalists of Tikaram Paliwal, the other chief ministerial aspirant.
In 1954, Mohanlal Sukhadia took the hot seat after resentment in the party ranks against Vyas saw him losing out on the throne.A similar power tussle played out in 1998 when the Congress stormed to power with a thumping mandate. The party high command handpicked Ashok Gehlot as the chief minister over Parasram Maderna, riling a vast swathe of the state’s Jat community, which had voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Congress.
