Rajasthan to get a new CM today: Will a new face emerge like MP and Chhattisgarh?

Rajasthan is now the only state left for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to announce its Chief Minister candidate. The party has already announced the CM for Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. While Mohan Yadav is selected as MP, tribal leader Vishnu Deo Sai will head the new government in Chhattisgarh.

The BJP is expected to pick a new face for Rajasthan too, just like it did in MP and Chhattisgarh. The party has appointed Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh along with two other observers who will hold a meeting with elected legislatures today in Jaipur at 4 pm.

Who are the top contenders?

The two-time CM of Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje, was initially considered a front-runner for the post, but the party’s decisions in MP and Chhattisgarh indicate that it is looking for new faces to head the government ahead of the Lok Sabha polls next year.

Thereby, Raje’s chance to be elected as CM for the third time by the legislatures is quite low. However, that makes the contest of a few others interesting, and the first among them is a former Union MP from Alwar.

Baba Balaknath: The saffron firebrand leader had won the parliamentary elections in 2019 from Alwar. But the party fielded him from the Tijara Constituency, one of the eight assembly constituents of Alwar.

He successfully won the seat against Congress’s Imran Khan by a margin of 6,173 votes.

A disciple of the late Mahant Chand Nath Yogi, Balak Nath was declared his successor in 2017 after Chand Nath’s demise. Often called Yogi of Rajasthan by his followers, Balak Nath commands a huge following in Alwar since he is also the head priest of the Baba Mastnath Mutt in Haryana.

Diya Kumari: Hailing from the royal family of Jaipur King, Diya Kumari was elected as Union Minister in 2019, but the party fielded her in the 2023 assembly polls too.

Kumari comprehensively won from the Vidhyadhar Nagar constituency with a margin of more than 71,000 votes.

Her name as a frontrunner for the CM post is also high, as she is one of the most popular BJP leaders in Rajasthan. She had formally entered politics in 2013, in front of PM Narendra Modi and Rajnath Singh, and had won her first election from the Sawai Madhopur seat.

In 2018, she didn’t contest, while in 2019, she was elected as an MP from Rajasthan’s Rajsamand seat.