Election battles can often get personal over the course of a campaign. In Dausa, Rajasthan, it was personal to begin with: The Congress and BJP candidates in the constituency are both from the Meena community and both former IPS officers. They’re also brothers.


The Congress has offered up union minister of state for finance, Namo Narain Meena. The 70-year-old is a two-time Member of Parliament and a recipient of the Presidential Police Medal and the Presidential Distinguished Service Medal. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s contender, Harish Chandra Meena, is Namo Narain's half brother and had been Director General of Police, among other posts, before he took voluntary retirement to get into politics.

The family feud has confused Meena voters who, like most communities in Rajasthan, tend to vote en bloc. “Both are well regarded and they’re both Meenas, so the votes are going to beyond the individuals — either to the Congress, where Meena votes traditionally went, or to the BJP, to bring in [Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra] Modi,” said Naresh Meena, a resident of Tonk, where eastern Rajasthan’s "Meena belt" begins.

But Namo Narain and Harish Chandra aren’t the only Meenas in this fight. Also in the fray is Kirori Lal Meena, a former BJP leader whose decision to quit the party was instrumental to ensuring the defeat of Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje’s candidates in the 2008 assembly elections.

Kirori Lal, who now fights from his own National People’s Party, is the sitting Member of Parliament from Dausa. In the 2008 elections, his party won enough seats to influence the state government — some say with the support of factions in the BJP that wanted to take down Vasundhara Raje. But the NPP has since fallen on hard times, winning only four seats in last year’s assembly elections. Despite being the sitting MP, then, Kirori Lal doesn’t have a head start.

“On the face of it, this leaves the Meena votes divided,” said a senior journalist in Rajasthan, who has covered the state for three decades. “But what often happens is that the communities engage in tactical voting. Instead of letting their votes split — which ends up being useful for other contenders from other castes — the leaders in the community settle on one candidate a few days before voting day, and the word is then spread.”

Attempting to take advantage of this situation are two prominent independents: sitting MLA Anju Dhanka and businessman-turned-politico Shivpal Gurjar, who will hope to see the four lakh Meena votes split while winning the support of other castes, including Dausa’s 2.5 lakh Gujjars and two lakh Brahmins.

This makes Dausa the most interesting of the five remaining contests in Rajasthan, which saw voting for 20 seats on April 17, with the rest on April 24. Dausa, the seat that was once held by Rajesh Pilot and then his wife Rama and son Sachin before it become reserved, abounds in storylines.

Kirori Lal Meena, for one, has been a long-time rival of the Meena family from which both Harish Chandra and Namo Narain hail. Their acrimony is so fierce that some believe Anju Dhanka has been propped up by Kirori Lal to ensure that someone takes advantage of the non-Meena votes, as Qamar Rabbani Chechi, a Kashmiri Gujjar, did five years ago.

Then there are the family dynamics themselves. Both Namo Narain and Harish Chandra were considered close to the Congress. Namo Narain has, of course, been a two-time MP for the party but Harish Chandra too was a protege of former chief minister Ashok Gehlot, who promoted him out of turn so that he could be DGP.

The BJP was never comfortable with him, even filing a complaint with the Election Commission during the assembly elections last year accusing him of partisan conduct, when he began "touring" the state’s Meena belt despite still being DGP. As soon as Vasundhara Raje returned to power, he was transferred to Rajasthan’s jail department, as Director General, and then again a few days later to Home Guards and Civil Defence before being sent to Delhi to be Secretary (Security) in the Cabinet Secretariat. Yet after taking voluntary retirement, he was promptly given membership in the BJP and offered the ticket the very next day.

Finally, there’s Shivpal Gurjar, whose idea of campaigning is straight from the 1990s: he brought actor Raveena Tandon to the constituency for two whole days of road shows. And it worked, too. People across Dausa and in neighbouring constituencies mentioned him because the former film star had turned up.

But Bollywood glitz won’t be enough to tip the scales. What might, though, is the decision that emerges in the the next few days, as the Meena elders come together to decide if they want to take sides in the family fight.