The Regal Rite

A DECADE AGO THIS time of the year when Rajasthan went into election mode, villagers of Bidasar in Churu district waited on rooftops to catch a glimpse of Vasundhara Raje, their former chief minister, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, and ‘maharani’. There were more women than men, in traditional lehariya, bandhini saris and lac bangles. Raje was dressed similarly, in hues of red, her royalty nonchalantly draped around her in a familial halo.

She tried to shed it as she addressed the crowds on livelihood issues, took on her opponents and gave interviews to the media. This was her third election as BJP’s chief ministerial face. “In the first I was new and people were still trying to figure out; in the second they were still hold­ing back. But people told me that if they wanted me to lose I would have lost by more seats. People are friendly and I have their affection,” she said. It was dark by the time her cavalcade moved through the barren landscape, lined by people. She spoke about the state’s finances under Congress rule, about Narendra Modi who was then the party’s prime ministerial candidate, her plans for infrastructure and social sector schemes. Unruffled by an unusually long stop at a railway crossing, she went on to matters less related to the elections. She could have been anyone—neither politician nor maharani, or both.

That year, another princess, Diya Kumari, then 43—from the royal family of Jaipur—took the plunge into politics at a rally in the Pink City in the presence of Raje and Modi, three days before the Gujarat chief minister was declared BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. Since then there has been no looking back for Diya, the daughter of Bhavani Singh, the last Maharaja of Jaipur, who was the stepson of one of India’s best-known royals-turned-politicians, Gayatri Devi. Diya’s return from Lok Sabha to fight the forthcoming state elections, at a time when Raje has not been named the party’s chief ministerial candidate, opened the door to speculation. Diya has maintained that Raje was her ‘mentor’.

A former Union minister, two-time chief minister, five-time MP and five-time MLA, Raje is one of the most successful royals to have trodden on the heat and dust of Rajasthan’s campaign trail, inheriting her allegiance to politics from her mother Vijaya Raje Scindia who had started her political career in Congress in 1957 from Guna in neighbouring Madhya Pradesh. The daughter of Maharaja of Gwali­or Jivajirao Scindia, Raje married into the Dholpur Jat dynasty and though her marriage did not last long, her bond with the people of Rajasthan did. With her son Dushyant Singh, a four-time MP from Jhalawar married into a Gujjar royal family, Raje represent­ed all of these castes and communities, or none of them. It had worked to BJP’s advantage. After her 2013 victory, she downsized her cavalcade, halved her security detail, and decided to stop at traffic lights like everyone else.

Maharajas or maharanis, or their heirs, have all spoken the dialect of their voters, dressed like them, sat on the floor or char­poys and broken bread with them. And even if they did not speak the local lingo, like Raje and Gayatri Devi, they managed to en­dear themselves to the locals. “Main thansu door nahi (I am not far from you),” was the tagline, written on leaflets strewn across villages, with the camel as the symbol of the campaign launched by Hanwant Singh, the ruler of Jodhpur, for his party Akhil Bhar­tiya Ramrajya Parishad in 1952, during independent India’s first election. In his book The House of Marwar, Dhananjaya Singh writes about how his campaign “electrified” Marwar: “I have no use for privy purses,” he cried at a meeting in the walled city, a mesmerising orator. “I have you, my people. Raise your hands, my privy purse!” And they did.

At that time, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had threatened to revoke the privy purses—money given to the rulers of princely states annually as part of an agreement to integrate them with the Indian Union. Finally it was in 1971, when Indira Gandhi was prime minister, that the privy purses were withdrawn. King or not, they continued to be ‘Maharaja’ for their people, holding sway over constituencies in what were once their kingdoms. In 1952, Singh had convincingly defeated Congress’ Jai Narain Vyas, winning the Jodhpur Lok Sabha seat. But on the day of counting, his two-seater plane crashed, killing the 29-year-old maharaja. His candidates won 31 of the 35 Assembly seats they contested and all four parliamentary seats.

A decade later, another royal, 44-year-old Gayatri Devi, married to Maharaja of Jaipur Sawai Man Singh II, was mak­ing waves on the state’s campaign trail. Many recall how she would stand, elegant and stately, wearing a chiffon sari and strings of pearls, among people. She, too, took on Congress, joining the Swatantra Party founded by C Rajagopalachari, or Rajaji, pay­ing the eight anna membership fee, and in the first parliamentary election she fought, she won by the biggest ever margin, entering the Guinness Book. At a victory procession, people poured into the streets of Jaipur while her husband threw gold coins from a rooftop.

Gayatri Devi seesawed between stepping out of the palace onto dusty village roads in a jeep and the ritzy life of cocktails, horses and holidays abroad. In an interview to Simi Garewal in 2002, the Rajmata of Jaipur talked about how people became a part of her life after she joined poli­tics, how she did not consider herself sophisticated, and how she felt that she did not count as a politician if she was not sent to jail like other opposition leaders during Emergency. But Gayatri Devi gradually grew disillusioned with contemporary politics. “You can do other things to do something for your country, like I am doing through schools,” she said. At the girls’ school she started in Jaipur, most Rajput girls abandoned the purdah.

After her husband’s sudden death in a polo match, Gayatri Devi wanted to give up politics. John Zubrzycki writes in his book, The House of Jaipur, that she stood for Parliament again at the urging of the grandmother of the Maharaja of Jodhpur and the Rajmata of Bikaner. “This time she threw open the gates of the hitherto City Palace to the general public, where she would sit like a commoner and hold talks with visiting constituents. On the hustings, she warned voters against the ‘deceptive slogans of socialism’ being peddled by the Congress party.”

Their numbers in the assembly may have dwindled, but with Rajputs influencing about 30 of the 200 assembly seats, neither BJP nor Congress can ignore them. The number of royal families in the state is estimated at 18, and half of them are said to be involved in state politics

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Gayatri Devi’s much-talked about beauty, aristocratic lifestyle and royal antecedents engulfed her, often overshadowing her public life, binding her in their trappings even as she felt the aboli­tion of the princely states had freed her from being maharani. “I met her much later. I remember how striking she was, amidst the crowd, addressing villagers in a posh sari, at a spontaneous meeting, very unlike a royal,” recalls Congress leader Manvendra Singh, the son of former Union minister Jaswant Singh, a Rajput who had joined BJP in 1980.

AFTER INDEPENDENCE, WITH the accession of the princely states to the Indian Union, the royals, most of whom had joined the anti-Congress Swatantra Party or the Jana Sangh, retained their appeal among people, even beyond the Rajput community which constitutes around 10 per cent (the figure ranges from below to over 10 per cent) of the state’s popula­tion. In the 1952 state elections, Rajputs won 51 of the 160 seats and Jats 12. Of the Rajputs who won, only three were from Congress. The trend, however, reversed in 1957, when only 26 Rajputs won, of whom 15 were from Congress, and the Jats won 23. The current Assembly of 200 seats has 17 Rajputs, of whom four belong to royal families. Ten of the Rajputs are from BJP and seven from Congress.

If Nehru loathed the royalty, so did Indira Gandhi, who did not hide her particular dislike for Gayatri Devi whose politics was root­ed in anti-Congressism. It was at Tihar jail, during Emergency, that the paths of the rajmatas of Jaipur and Gwalior—Gayatri Devi and Vijaya Raje Scindia—crossed. Of the same age, and both opposition MPs, they were married into states they represented in Parliament. They would not have imagined then that over four decades later, descendants of their families—Vasundhara Raje and Diya Kumari, both in BJP—would be seen to be pitted against each other. It was in Raje’s presence that Diya joined politics in 2013 and won the Sawai Madhopur Assembly seat. But relations between them soured when Raje government officials, in an anti-encroachment drive, sealed the gates of Diya Kumari’s family-owned Rajmahal Palace hotel. Now, Diya, an MP from Rajsamand, has been fielded from Jaipur’s Vidhyadhar Nagar Assembly seat held by five-time BJP MLA Narpat Singh Rajvi, a Raje loyalist and son-in-law of former Vice President and Chief Minister Bhairon Singh Shekhawat. A later list included Raje’s name from her Jhalrapatan seat and Rajvi’s from Chittorgarh even as the state was abuzz with murmurs about Diya being groomed by the BJP leadership to be the next royal to replace the ‘maharani’ of Dholpur who is now 70.

Diya, 18 years younger than Raje, follows in the footsteps of royal politicians who have tried to set aside their princely aura to be seen as being of the people, as commoners and not rulers. Like Gayatri Devi, whom she describes as her inspiration, Diya has taken up causes relating to women and education, opening two schools in the city. Again, like her idol, Diya has swung be­tween breaking tradition and succumbing to it. Diya’s decision to marry Narendra Singh Rajawat, an employee of the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum trust, defying her parents and the Rajput Sabha, gave her an exceptional contemporaneity. Yet, her son Padmanabh, whom Bhawani Singh adopted, going against tradition by adopting a daughter’s son, was anointed maharaja in more of a symbolic gesture to keep alive a Rajput tradition.

Diya Kumari’s father was not as successful as her in his brief flirtation with politics. Bhawani Singh joined Congress in 1988 and in the following year suffered a humiliating defeat in Jaipur at the hands of BJP’s Girdhari Lal Bhargava, who campaigned on his scooter. Bhargava juxtaposed his common-man image against the Jaipur ‘Maharaja’. That same year, Mahendra Singh, the elder son of the ruler of Mewar Maharana Bhagwat Singh, a descendant of Maharana Pratap, won on a BJP ticket from Chittorgarh by a huge margin, defeating Congress. It is said that tribals in Chittorgarh offered him teeka in blood. He, however, joined Congress later and lost the next two elections. The family stayed away from politics till recently when his son Vishvaraj Singh Mewar joined BJP. While his forefathers fought the Mughals, Diya Kumari’s ancestor Man Singh fought with Akbar’s army against Maharana Pratap in the Battle of Haldighati. The Mewar royal joined the party in the presence of the Jaipur royal. BJP, which is trying to regain its hold over the Ra­jput community, also took into its fold polo player Bhawani Singh Kalvi, the son of late Lokendra Singh Kalvi who headed the Karni Sena, an outfit claiming to uphold Rajput interests that protested against Bollywood films Padmaavat and Jodha Akbar. Besides, BJP has again given A ticket to Siddhi Kumari, the three-time MLA and granddaughter of the last Maharaja of Bikaner Karni Singh who fought the Lok Sabha polls as an independent in 1952 and went on to win the seat five times.

Many recall how Gayatri Devi would stand, elegant and stately, wearing a chiffon sari and strings of pearls, among people. She, too, took on Congress, joining the Swatantra Party founded by Rajaji. In her first parliamentary election, she won by the biggest ever margin

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With Rajputs revolting against Raje in the 2018 Assembly polls, of the 26 candidates BJP fielded from the community, only 10 won. Congress gave tickets to 15, of whom seven won. Among them was Vishvendra Singh, the son of the last ruler of Bharatpur, a three-time MP from the seat, once of the Janata Dal and twice as a BJP nominee. A minister in the Ashok Gehlot government in Rajasthan, Singh, who has been nominated again to contest, addressed a recent gathering in Bharatpur and said that he was neither a minister nor an MP but their “chowkidar (guard)”.

Their numbers in the Assembly may have dwindled, but with Rajputs influencing about 30 of the 200 Assembly seats, neither BJP nor Congress can ignore them. The number of royal families in the state is estimated at 18, and half of them are said to be involved in state politics. With power being intrinsic to their survival, the shift to the political arena came instinctively, their royal tag both a boon and a burden. Some of them have become businesspeople, capitalising on their biggest assets—the palaces—turning those into hotels. Several royal heirs have been entangled in legal battles and feuds over ancestral property and undeclared assets, tearing the families apart. Yet, the heady blend of mystique, palace intrigues, lavish lifestyles and politics has held a fascination that surpasses the question of their relevance. “As for the royals, they may not be recognised by the Constitution, but they live in people’s lives be­cause of a social continuity,” says Manvendra Singh.

“In purely electoral terms, the Scindias score over the Nehru- Gandhi family for their uninterrupted stint in Parliament or in a state assembly since 1957. Between 1991 and 1996, nobody from the Gandhi family was a member of Parliament. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in May 1991 and Maneka Gandhi had lost as a Janata Dal candidate from Pilibhit in the general election that year,” writes journalist Rasheed Kidwai in his book The House of Scindias.

It is unlikely that the royals will quit the political battlefield since oblivion is the last thing they would want.

About The Author

Amita Shah