Rajasthan Elections: Lobby whiff looms as Mahesh Joshi seeks to find why he's out of poll turf

Mahesh Joshi

Veteran Congressman Mahesh Joshi sees his boat has come to a halt where there's no water. "Meri kashti aisi jagah ruk chuki hai jahan pani nahi hai," he says on being dropped off the party's list for the November 25 polls.

Joshi, who calls himself a Ashok Gehlot loyalist, tells Moneycontrol that this was not the time to drop him as the BJP-led central government is running a political vendetta against him by using the Enforcement Directorate which has raided 27 locations in the Jal Jeevan Mission-linked money laundering case.

“I have been denied tickets many times, but never felt bad and continued to stand with party’s ideology. This time, it has been done without any reason and no one from the party even called me once,” Joshi says at his Civil Lines residence.

Though the former MP from Jaipur has been holding public meetings and rallies in support of RR Tiwari, who has replaced him in the Hawa Mahal Assembly seat, he believes his political journey has been spoilt by the top leadership.

Joshi was among those accused of indiscipline with the boycott of a Congress Legislature Party (CLP) meeting convened for selecting a new chief minister in Jaipur in September 2022.

He doesn’t, however, see it as a reason of getting dropped. Joshi believes that there’s a lobby of leaders in the state and in New Delhi, which played against him for standing in favour of current Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot..

“I am fighting a battle within to find out the why I was dropped. If it is about age, then there are many elders than me who have been fielded. If it was about not attending the CLP meeting, then there were other MLAs too and they were not dropped, such as Shanti Dhariwal and Pratap Singh Khachariyawas,” says the 69-year-old leader.

Joshi is one of the three ministers of the current regime who did not get tickets to contest the polls. The other two are Forest Minister Hemaram Choudhary and Agriculture Minister Lalchand Kataria, but both of them wanted to keep off the state polls.

Joshi has won the Hawa Mahal seat in 2018 and was elected to the Lok Sabha from Jaipur in 2009. The Congress won the Jaipur parliamentary seat only thrice – 1952, 1984 and 2009.

He was the Congress Chief Whip in the Assembly before his appointment as the cabinet minister holding the public health engineering department (PHED).

Jaipur had witnessed a high-voltage drama in September last year when legislators gathered demanding continuity of Ashok Gehlot both as the chief minister and the state party chief. According to Joshi, the situation worsened because of Sachin Pilot and his supporting MLAs.

“Much before the CLP meeting was called, Pilot and his MLAs were speaking in the Assembly that the CM will change and ministers too will change. And when the meeting was called, there was no agenda, all of us were annoyed over choice of Pilot, who had rebelled against the party,” Joshi says.

With Joshi falling from the grace of the Congress High Command, he has been getting offers from the BJP camp but he remained undeterred. “I have always supported Ashok Gehlot, who has made the Congress what it is today in Rajasthan. If the party wins these elections, credit goes to him only for make leadership strong,” he says.