Feud between Ashok Gehlot and Sachin Pilot enters a decisive phase

The latest round of the war of words between Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and his former deputy Sachin Pilot are signs of the tussle for power between them hurtling towards a culmination.

If Gehlot has, through his allegations that party MLAs took money from the BJP to topple his government in 2020, indicated that he is in no mood to make any concessions for Pilot, the latter has, by his no-holds-barred attack on the chief minister, shown his readiness to step into the final stages of the long-running feud.

It is no secret that Gehlot is unwilling to make any space for Pilot in the scheme of things in Rajasthan Congress. He has been successful in pushing his bete noire to the sidelines, and his main argument against bringing Pilot onto the centrestage is that he had allegedly colluded with the BJP in an attempt to effect a leadership change in July 2020.

According to party leaders in the state, Gehlot set the cat amongst the pigeons with his recent speech in Dholpur where he accused party MLAs of having taken money from the BJP to try and topple his government. He had also said in the speech that former chief minister Vasundhara Raje had helped save his government by opposing the BJP's efforts to buy Congress MLAs.

Gehlot's obvious target when he made the speech was Pilot as his reference was to the rebellion his former deputy had led against him in July 2020. It is felt that through the speech, Gehlot has also unsettled the BJP by highlighting the purported divisions in the state unit of the party.

The speech resulted in Pilot launching himself into a strident, no-holds-barred attack on Gehlot. He had already made the central leadership of the party upset by sitting on a day-long Anshan on April 11, demanding that Gehlot should expedite action against Raje over the alleged scams during her tenure as chief minister. The party high command had described the sit-in as anti-party activity.

Those in the Pilot camp say that Gehlot, through the speech, would have wanted Pilot to launch himself into some kind of response. It is evident that there is an escalation in the tension in Rajasthan Congress with Pilot's press conference in which he hit out at Gehlot and announced that he would go on a padayatra from Ajmer to Jaipur.

What is notable is that Pilot, for the first time, stated clearly that he along with other MLAs had travelled to Delhi in July 2020 to seek a change of leadership in the state. Also, he made it clear that it was now untenable for him to function with Gehlot, given the nature of the verbal onslaught he launched against the chief minister. He said it appeared that Gehlot's leader was not Sonia Gandhi but Raje. He also accused Gehlot of being hand-in-hand with Raje, saying when he heard Gehlot's speech in Dholpur, it became clear to him why he had not acted yet against the former chief minister.

That Pilot held the press conference just a day before voting was to take place in Karnataka—an election that is extremely crucial for the Congress—makes clear the leader's restlessness over the party leadership failing to resolve the tussle between him and Gehlot and his readiness for the fight to enter a decisive phase. Pilot goes into the five-day yatra mode amidst clear indications that the central leadership does not want to effect a leadership change in the state with just a little over six months to go for assembly elections. He is also aware that the party high command's message with regard to Rajasthan is that the party is more important than an individual.