For five years, the Congress struggled to not let the tension between Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and his former deputy Sachin Pilot upstage the narrative of its welfare model but all its efforts fell short, as out of the 31 seats that the Congress lost in the Rajasthan Assembly election, 14 come from the eastern part of the State, where Mr. Pilot’s community, the Gujjars, hold sway.
In 2018, when the Congress came to power, Mr. Pilot was the party president in the State, and many felt that he was the rightful claimant to the Chief Minister’s post. But the party leadership thought otherwise and Mr. Gehlot took over the mantle for the third time. The Congress has been stumbling from one crisis to other from the July 2020 mutiny by Mr. Pilot that nearly endangered the Gehlot government to the September 2022 crisis when Mr. Gehlot’s supporters cocked a snook at the party’s central leadership by boycotting the meeting of legislators called by them and organised a parallel meeting instead.
