Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje on Sunday said the Bharatiya Janata Party’s losses in the bye-elections in the state were a wake-up call for the party, the Hindustan Times reported. “We are reviewing why such a situation arose despite so much development,” Raje said while addressing BJP legislators in the Assembly.
The Congress, which is in Opposition in Rajasthan, won all three seats that went to the polls on January 29 – Lok Sabha seats Alwar and Ajmer and Assembly constituency Mandalgarh. The results were declared on February 1.
Raje also advised the MLAs against working towards “self-goals”, according to The Indian Express. She was addressing the legislators ahead of the Budget Session of the Rajasthan Assembly that begins on Monday.
However, she told party leaders there was “no need to get disappointed with these results as we together will perform well and succeed again”. Raje urged the BJP MLAs to compare the developmental work done by the party to that of the previous Congress government in Rajasthan.
Rajasthan BJP President Ashok Parnami said the results were alarming, but that the “roots of the Lotus” – the BJP’s party symbol – were not weak, and that they are analysing the results of the bye-elections.
BJP leader says people unhappy with Raje
Meanwhile, the BJP’s Other Backward Classes wing president in Kota district, Ashok Chaudhary, wrote a letter to the party’s National President Amit Shah, strongly criticising Raje’s leadership, News18 reported.
“On February 1, the results for the Rajasthan bye-polls came and they disappointed the hardworking workers of the BJP,” he said. “Some workers, such as me, knew that the result would not go in the party’s favour. The people of the state are not happy with Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje’s way of working and the morale of party workers is going down.”
He also claimed that Parmani works like a “slave” of the chief minister and is doing “immeasurable damage” to the BJP’s organisation in Rajasthan. He alleged that Raje was surrounded by a bureaucratic trap and is “leading the party on a path where it will only find loss.”
However, the BJP’s Kota district president Hemant Vijay praised Raje for development in the state, and claimed that Chaudhary had told him that the letter was a mistake and he would like to take it back.
Rajasthan is one of the eight states where Assembly elections will be held later this year.
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