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. 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.
The two leaders from Jodhpur (Gehlot is a five-time ex-MP) have been at daggers drawn in recent years. Gehlot had accused Shekhawat of plotting to pull down his government in connivance with the Sachin Pilot-led rebels in 2020 and got the police to book him on the strength of a purported audio clip allegedly featuring him and other rebels. Shekhawat denied the allegations. In the 2019 Lok Sabha poll, Shekhawat inflicted a humiliating defeat on Gehlot’s son Vaibhav despite Gehlot senior campaigning widely for him. In 2021, Shekhawat lodged an FIR against Gehlot’s Officer on Special Duty Lokesh Sharma with the Delhi Police, accusing him of distributing recordings of tapped conversations about the plot allegedly featuring the Union minister.
Too much was at stake for the two politically to wind down their attacks on each other. For Gehlot, it’s his authority as CM, nearly fully undermined two years back. For Shekhawat, it is about hoping to leapfrog over half a dozen BJP leaders and replacing Vasundhara Raje as the CM candidate, an ambition Gehlot is determined to not let fructify.
After the open disagreement and the subsequent name-calling, the wily Gehlot has changed tack. He has asked Shekhawat to ensure, as Union Jal Shakti minister, to get a national project status—it enables a state to get 60 per cent funding from the Centre—for the ERCP proposal and thus demonstrate his commitment to the state and clout as a leader at the Centre.
Shekhawat points out that Gehlot has never responded to his calls for discussing the issue with the other stakeholder, Madhya Pradesh. Besides funding, a key matter is the amount of water to be harvested. The ERCP proposes to harvest 3,700 million cubic metres (MCM) of surplus water during the rainy season in southern Rajasthan and use it in the water deficit areas of the state’s southeastern parts, before the same flows into the river Chambal. But MP insists it should be curbed at 1,700 MCM, because the river flows through it too. Rajasthan, in turn, points out that the 2,000 MCM water that MP wants to flow into it unimpeded goes unused into the Ganga via the Yamuna. “MP
GEHLOT WANTS SHEKHAWAT TO GET NATIONAL STATUS FOR ERCP AND SHOW HIS DEDICATION TO RAJASTHAN
should have no objection to this surplus water being used,” says Gehlot. Confined to 1,700 MCM, the ERCP, he has said, will remain a drinking water project. Rajasthan also reminds the Centre that even bearing the 40 per cent cost is a burden for a resource-deficit state like it.
Much of the blame for the ERCP not taking off is laid at Shekhawat’s door, for his supposed inaction. The Union minister says he is working to include the ERCP into the river linking project, as was originally conceived, so that it gets 90 per cent central funding. “Gehlot is more into playing politics rather than sitting with us to see how ERCP gets through. We cannot twist norms…for such projects,” he says.
As the concerned minister, Shekhawat is also frustrated at Rajasthan’s slow progress in executing PM Modi’s flagship JJM scheme, which aims to provide tapped drinking water to every rural household. Rajasthan ranks a lowly 29th amongst all states and UTs—only 25 per cent of its households have tapped water and it has withdrawn only Rs 2,345 crore of the Centre’s Rs 10,181 crore allocation for 2021-22 so far. Rajasthan too has tied up its compliance with the JJM to the ERCP, saying that as a water deficit state, it will be able to provide tap water only if the Centre extends help with the canal project.
“Shekhawat must realise that we do not have that much water to provide connections for all households,” Gehlot has said.
However, the well-publicised JJM is popular, and the ungainly scrimmage between Gehlot and Shekhawat hasn’t gone down well. Gehlot’s rivals within the Congress criticise the slow rollout of the JJM, questioning his choice of IAS officers entrusted with executing it. For all his defiance, Gehlot has had to make changes in the PHED and irrigation departments and re-allocate resources to them.
Gehlot has now written to PM Modi, requesting a revision of the deadline for JJM to 2026 from 2024 for Rajasthan, citing a wide range of reasons for the delay—from the 2020 Covid lockdown to spiralling prices due to the war in Ukraine.
On the other hand, Shekhawat’s rivals in Rajasthan question his allegiance to his home state and insist he cannot escape responsibility by merely accusing Gehlot.
“He unnecessarily made ERCP a big issue at the conference. Now, if the Centre clears it, Gehlot will get credit and if it does not, he has threatened to make it an election issue…about the Centre’s discrimination,” says a top Rajput leader of the BJP. ■