A Famous Victory

Sachin Pilot engineers a Congress resurgence in the state bypolls, but what will worry the BJP more is the massive margins by which it lost

- Rohit Parihar and Uday Mahurkar

Perhaps more than its own defeat, it is the Congress’s resounding margins in all the 17 assembly segments included in the three (two Lok Sabha and one assembly) by-elections that has left the Vasundhara Raje-led BJP government shellshocked here.

While the surprising numbers secured by the Congress—some 700,000 voters have shifted to the party in the past three-and-a-half years—reflect the disillusionment with the BJP state government, they also point to a calibrated political strategy executed by state Congress chief Sachin Pilot. Allowed a free hand by party president Rahul Gandhi since the 2014 defeat, young Pilot has travelled an astonishing 500,000 kilometres crisscrossing Rajasthan to resurrect the party. Apart from the countless worker meetings and political rallies in the remotest corners of the state, Pilot used the time to even put in an appearance at local weddings and funerals. The huge connect he’s been able to build allowed the Congress to do what was hitherto the RSS-backed BJP’s forte—booth-level management that accounted for each and every voter in Alwar, Ajmer and Mandalgarh.