In a move which could furthur lead to senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Arun Jaitley's political blood pressure shooting up, his pet bete noire Sudhanshu Mittal has been "informally" put in charge of election management in Rajasthan by party president Rajnath Singh.
Sources in the BJP state that the arranagement is purely informal and there is nothing official about it. Sudhanshu Mittal who is more than familiar with the election scene in Rajasthan, having managed the assembly election of 2003 for the party has already made two trips to Jaipur in the last one week and has had a meeting with Vasundhara Raje Scindia also, to discuss the problems which the party is facing in the state.
It is learnt that the BJP is worried about some rebels as well as some middlemen who are creating problems for the BJP in the state. Rajasthan is being handled by Soudan Singh from the BJP in Delhi but sources state that the situation is not looking very rosy for the party which won 21 seats out of 25, leaving the Congress with a miserly 4 seats in the state.
Apart from Madhya Pradesh, from where the BJP got the highest number of seats 25 in 2004, the second highest had come from Rajasthan.
The thinking amongst the top ranking BJP leaders is that the party has to work to minimize the depletion in its kitty from these two states where its performance had touched optimum. Any major losses from Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh would prove costly for LK Advani's attempts to emerge as the single largest party, since the BJP does not have any state from where these losses can be made up to put Advani's campaign for the prime ministership on track.
In this context, sources say that L.K.Advani has no problems in allowing Sudhanshu Mittal to handle the election management in the state, where the BJP is still demoralized from its assembly defeat and major infighting amongst its senior leaders can only help the Congress to increase its tally in the state.
Sources say that while the BJP top leadership is keen to use the services of Mittal to bring the state back into "advantage BJP" mode, they did not want to create yet another controversy in the midst of elections and that is why Sudhanshu was sent to the state without any fanfare. The operation was done so quietly that forget the media, even
the BJP leaders themselves did not know that he is being asked to handle Rajasthan for the duration of the elections. Elections in the state would be in the fourth phase on May 7.
