Just before the Rajasthan Assembly election results were going to be announced in 2018, a video of Jaipur district Congress president Pratap Singh Khachariyawas went viral on social media. In it, he was heard saying that Ashok Gehlot cannot decide who should be the chief minister and it was a decision to be made by the Congress president (then, it was Rahul Gandhi).
At the time, with exit polls predicting a victory for the Congress, Sachin Pilot was thought to be a front-runner for the CM’s chair. Khachariyawas was counted as Pilot’s right-hand man and an indispensable ally at the time, someone who took the lead in countering leaders from the Gehlot camp. But things did not turn his way.
For those who have followed the minister’s political trajectory, this is not surprising. Though his uncle Bhairon Singh Shekhawat was a founding member of the BJP — he also became Rajasthan CM and the Vice-President of India — Khachariyawas has charted his own course in his political journey.
His ancestral village in Sikar district is called Khachariyawas and is the birthplace of Shekhawat. The minister was active in student politics, raising issues of Rajput pride. He was once accused of glorifying the practice of Sati due to his alleged participation in rallies protesting police action in the case of Roop Kanwar who committed sati in 1987. In 1992, Khachariyawas won the Rajasthan University Students’ Union elections by defeating the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad’s Satish Poonia, who is the Rajasthan BJP president at present. In 2004, Khachariyawas and several other politicians were acquitted of the charge of glorifying sati.
In the party, he is known to be an accessible leader with a pulse on developments on the ground. When Pilot took charge of the Congress state unit in January 2014, Khachariyawas was fresh from losing the 2013 Assembly elections from the Civil Lines seat.
He became one of Pilot’s mainstays and was instrumental in organising several protests against the Raje-led BJP government. After the encounter of gangster Anandpal Singh in 2017, Khachariyawas mobilised the Rajput community against the government and played a key role in convincing a large chunk of the community to vote for the Congress instead of the BJP, traditionally its favourite.
The Pilot loyalist found space in the Gehlot-led Cabinet in 2018 after being elected for the second time and was allotted the transport portfolio.
Khachariyawas won for a second time from Civil Lines.
Pratap Singh Khachariyawas was by Sachin Pilot’s side when he made a play for the Rajasthan CM’s chair. Now, the Cabinet minister is one of Ashok Gehlot’s most vocal supporters.
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The notice had accused the senior Congress leader, against whom the BJP had also filed a complaint with the Election Commission over his remarks during campaigning for the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections.
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