WHAT'S FANNING THE GAJENDRA-GEHLOT FEUD?

The distant lights of an impending election often get clearer through the bustle of a succession of political jousts.

- Rohit Parihar

Rajasthan, where elections are due in December 2023, saw an unusually fierce face-off in recent weeks between two old rivals—Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Congress’s Ashok Gehlot, and the BJP’s Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, MP from Jodhpur and the Union Jal Shakti minister. In their brusque quarrel played out in public, one reads the trails of future ambition, past animosity over a political crisis, election results, and the adversarial equation between the parties. But what triggered it was water, something critical for parched Rajasthan.

It began when Shekhawat was chairing a regional conference of 11 states and UTs on the Centre’s Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) and Swachh Bharat Mission in Jaipur on April 8. At the conference, Rajasthan’s Public Health Engineering Department (PHED) minister Mahesh Joshi said that PM Narendra Modi had promised to give national project status to the Eastern Rajasthan Canal Project (ERCP) before the 2018 assembly poll, repeating a claim Gehlot has been making. Under the ERCP, the then BJP government in Rajasthan had sent a Rs 45,000 crore proposal to the Centre to harvest surplus rain and river water and supply it to 13 districts for drinking and irrigation.

Shekhawat interrupted Joshi and corrected him, saying that the PM had never made such a promise, only assured a “technical review” of the proposal. Shekhawat didn’t stop there. He went on to advise Joshi and Gehlot to take “sanyas” for making wrong allegations and told Joshi that it was not the forum to play politics over the issue.

Since then, the gloves have been off for the two. Gehlot promptly hit out at Shekhawat, calling him “shameless”. He also taunted him for not being able to convince the PM about the project.