Raje’s son eyes Cabinet, might face competition

Rajasthan chief minist e r Vasundhara Raje’s son Dushyant Singh is among the newly- elected Lok Sabha MPs hoping to be part of the Modi government. Other hopefuls are Bikaner MP Arjun Meghwal, Dausa MP Harish Chandra Meena, Udaipur MP Arjun Lal Meena, Jaipur Rural MP Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, Om Birla from Kota and Colonel Sonaram Choudhary from Barmer.

Dushyant Singh is the seniormost MP, having won consecutive three elections, and his mother’s significant contribution of all 25 seats in the BJP’s landmark victory makes him a strong contender for a berth in Team Modi. In fact, her detractors believe that her decision to deny tickets to a couple of senior leaders like Jaswant Singh and Subhash Maharia was also a ploy to keep every challenger out of contention. Both Mr Jaswant Singh and Mr Maharia were ministers in Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government, which would have made them strong claimants for important positions in Mr Modi’s Cabinet.

However, Dushyant may still have to face some competition from some newlyelected MPs as well as Rajya Sabha member and party national secretary Bhupendra Yadav, who is being credited with effective strategy and management of the party’s campaigns in the Assembly and Lok Sabha elections. Mr Yadav, who belongs to the Sangh lobby in the party and is considered close to Ms Raje, has strong links in Delhi as well.

Besides, some people in the party believe that Mr Modi, who has made dynasty a key poll plank against the Congress, may not like the idea of including Dushyant in his team and thus give the Opposition a chance to criticise him for having double standards on this issue.

The problem is that there may not be too many positions on offer for Rajasthan as the BJP not only has 282 members of its own, but 60 more from NDA partners. Although Rajasthan has contributed 25 seats, the BJP will have to give more weightage to states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which are politically more important because of number of seats as well as the BJP MPs they have sent this time. According to a senior leader, Mr Modi is not likely to have a jumbo Cabinet and initially not more than one or two would find place from Rajasthan in which case the party would give more importance to social engineering.