Months after Vasundhara Raje ceded Assembly, how BJP swept all LS seats again

Rajasthan is one of the states where the BJP swept all 25 seats in both the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha (LS) polls. Even though many commentators believed there was no “Modi wave” in the 2019 elections, the victory in Rajasthan for the BJP is even bigger in 2019 than in 2014. The average vote share of the winning BJP candidates has increased from 54.08 per cent in 2014 to 60.35 per cent in 2019.
 
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Rajasthan, however, presents a curious case. In the December 2018 Vidhan Sabha (VS) elections, the Congress made a strong comeback, and formed the government in the state with the help of the BSP’s two seats. So, what happened in the last five months that the Congress could not win a single seat in Rajasthan in Lok Sabha?
One, it has to do with the way Rajasthan’s voters voted in the 2018 VS elections. Voters wanted to punish Vasundhara Raje for several reasons — agrarian distress, Rajput anger, her alleged governance scams, her uneasy relationship with the RSS, an increasingly arrogant image of her as a maharani and a general anti-incumbency in the state where power alters alternatively between the Congress and the BJP every VS election. The slogan Modi tujhse bair nahin, rani teri khair nahin (We have no grudges against you, Modi, but Vasundhara will not be spared) encapsulates it all. The Congress used all this to its advantage. Moreover, it brought the Muslims and Dalits to its fold after a spate of lynchings of individuals of both communities. Vasundhara Raje was ousted, but Modi was spared.

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