Results declared on Monday, 14 September, saw the BJP scrape through by securing a bare majority in four of the 10 municipal corporations. Reports from 309 urban local bodies and 10,120 wards across the state suggested that the BJP won 4,132 wards, while the Congress won 3,568. The victory of independents, many of them Congress and BJP rebels, as well as smaller parties, has come as a warning to the BJP. Panchayat polls are to follow, while the assembly election is due in 2028.
As the ruling party, the BJP was expected to win big, particularly in urban areas. The final result, however, showed a one-percentage-point gap in vote share between the Congress and the BJP, Rajasthan Pradesh Congress president Govind Singh Dotasra claimed. He predicted that the BJP would fare worse in the panchayat elections. He also alleged interference by ministers, bureaucrats and the police during counting, intimidation of Congress candidates and councillors, and gerrymandering of wards.
Dotasra alleged that the uneven delimitation of wards led to wards where Muslims, Dalits and OBCs dominated to be much larger than the rest. He found several pro-Congress wards with 20,000 voters while the pro-BJP wards had much smaller numbers. This was to ensure that traditional BJP voters were clustered together while traditional Congress voters were pushed into groups which were more varied and mixed.
What stands out is the BJPโs hard-fought โwinโ despite the delimitation of wards to its advantage, the use of the state machinery and police, road shows by the chief minister Bhajan Lal Sharma and campaigning by all four union ministers from Rajasthan, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Arjun Ram Meghwal, Bhupender Yadav, and Bhagirath Choudhary. The RSS and party MPs were also pressed into the campaign following the intervention of the BJP Organising Secretary B.L. Santhosh. Teams of ministers and workers too were brought in from other BJP-ruled states to work for the party in power.
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