In bastion, CM's clout overrides BJP's charge

The Mahamandir lane in the heart of Sardarpura twinkles with colourful lights to celebrate Diwali. Sixty-year-old Jagdish Sambhariya is one of the many people meandering through the quaint pathways of Jodhpur's walled city, its festivity masking the political fervour of the crucial assembly elections in Rajasthan, scheduled for November 25.

- Sachin Saini

But Sambhariya has another explanation for why the political debates are limited. "Across the state, people [vote] for their legislators. But here, in Sardarpura, we vote for the chief minister," Sambhariya says.

Jodhpur, and Sardarpura, have for long been identified with one man. It is from the Jodhpur Lok Sabha seat that chief minister Ashok Gehlot was a five-time member of Parliament between 1980 and 1998. He then switched to state politics, and has been an MLA from Sardarpura five times, including his three terms as the chief minister. For the past two Lok Sabha elections, in the middle of a BJP wave that has swept through the Hindi heartland, Union minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat has represented the parliamentary polls, but at the state level, Gehlot's influence is clear. In 2008, he beat the BJP candidate by 15,500 votes, a number that increased to 18,478 in 2013. But in the 2018 elections, his scale of victory rose to 45,597 votes.