How To Think About Rajasthan Politics

Campaigning for assembly elections in Rajasthan has entered the last lap. The contest is a close one.

Both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have pulled out all stops in this final phase. There is vitriol in the air, and anticipation too, as millions await the final verdict.

Rajasthan is broadly divided by geography into two regions: the hills in the east and the north, defined by the Aravalli range, which runs from north east to south west; and the vast Thar desert, which covers much of the west and the north.

It is a lot more diverse demographically, with different communities concentrated in larger numbers in different parts of the state.

These distributions overlap in places, and offer the Congress an opportunity to play divisive identity politics. This is in stark contrast to the BJP’s approach of fostering a supra-caste consolidation, and in many ways, every verdict is an assemblage of such diverse contests.

The Jat vote speaks louder here, in the Shekhawati region north of Jaipur, and further to the east, in the districts bordering Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana.

On the other hand, the scheduled caste vote is more concentrated in the north of the state, plus sizeable pockets in the Kota-Bharatpur belt, along the southern flank of the Aravalli range. As per the 2011 census, they constitute approximately 18 per cent of the population.

Now, one would have thought that this distribution, plus the tribal vote, would have made Rajasthan a happy hunting ground for the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).

The Muslim community, which constitutes 9 per cent of the population, is primarily spread across the centre of the state, in a broad belt which runs west from Jaisalmer and Barmer, through Jodhpur, Ajmer and Jaipur, east to the borders of Uttar Pradesh.

Combining the Dalit, tribal and Muslim votes, we see that much of the state is prone to vote banking and appeasement.

This reduced bipolarity means that a candidate in Rajasthan can, and often does, win with a lower vote share and smaller margins.

However, the big takeaway from our study of Rajasthan demographics is that no one community can successfully project its electoral power across the rest of the state, because it is geographically restricted to sub regions.

This is what makes Rajasthan assembly elections so difficult to predict, and this is also why the popular mandate shifts from one party to another, even if the vote swings are small.