Jaswant Singh does not withdraw nomination

For a founder member of the BJP and a man whom Atal Behari Vajpayee described as one of his three 'best friends', the other two L K Advani and N M Ghatate, Jaswant Singh's current circumstances are unpleasant.

His party, he says, tried to buy him out with an offer of nominating him as Vice President of India later, tried to bully him through threats delivered through persons about whom he has no opinion (Arun Jaitley, for one) and tried to turf him out of his home and hearth.

His opponents in the party ask: what home? And what hearth? Jaswant Singh has never represented Barmer in the Lok Sabha, they say. In his last two terms he was MP from Darjeeling and before that, MP from Chittor. "The party has nominated him nine times…"exclaimed Jaitley and bit back the rest of the sentence.

Singh's beef is not with the party - "I helped found it, for heaven's sake", he says impatiently. He says he is fighting a battle of principle. Singh belongs to that era in the BJP when the party would have to field one person in two, three seats, knowing full well it would lose in most. Decisions were taken collectively for there was no other way. That is no longer the case, he says.

What is even more galling in this election is the fact that a man who hasn't been in the BJP for three weeks has been nominated to become the official candidate of the party. Col Sonaram, a Jat, was virtually hustled into the BJP to keep Singh out. It became a personal battle for Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia to keep the Jaswant Singh family in check: after Jaswant Singh's wife Sheetal, tried but failed to file an FIR against the Chief Minister (during her last term in office) for endorsing Raje's depiction as a goddess on a calendar printed by an obsequious supporter. Raje responded by filing a case against Jaswant Singh under the Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act for offering opium to clansmen as part of a ritual called 'riyan': this in a land where you can buy a kilo of dehusked poppy legitimately on your ration card and the demand is that the quantity be restored to the original 4 kg !

Local newspapers have published pictures of his supporters climbing up on poles to throw black ink on posters of Narendra Modi which proclaim:'ghar ghar Modi, har har Modi'. For Singh this is entirely appropriate, for the posters reeks of the tendency he has always opposed: the cult of personality. More so because this is the personality that hounded him out of the BJP in Shimla in 2009 ostensibly because of a book written by him calling for a re-evaluation of Jinnah, but mainly because of a perception that he had been critical of the role of Sardar Patel in the book: and nothing could be further from the truth had the protagonists of that drama actually read the book, he says. Gujarat was the first state to ban it.

The Congress was in touch with him and even invited him to join it. He said if they meant what they said, they would have asked the winner from the seat, Harish Choudhary, to step down in his favour. Choudhary's nomination was delayed by a day but ultimately he is the official Congress candidate from Barmer.

This makes Barmer, the biggest Lok Sabha constituency in India in terms of territory, one of the most interesting electoral battles in this election. The calculation is that Jat votes will be divided between the Congress and the BJP; and with Muslims and other castes, the Rajputs led by Jaswant Singh will kiss victory on April 17. A scant month later, the country will know who the winner really is. But whatever the result, Jaswant Singh has the quiet conviction that he will have won any way.