Is BJP not happy with Raje's Raj?

It seems to be a tightrope walk for Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje. The fact that the BJP leadership in Delhi has a very strong opinion against her style of functioning was discernible recently when she failed to get an audience from party chief Amit Shah despite camping in the Capital for about three days. Raje reportedly wanted to discuss with Shah the long-awaited state cabinet expansion. But Shah, a close confidant of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, remained "pre-occupied" with the Assembly polls in Maharashtra and Haryana and left for Mumbai leaving the chief minister in an awkward situation. Raje doesn't have a full-fledged council of ministers. In fact, she has been running the government affairs with the mandatory minimum strength of 12 ministers, including water resources minister Sanwar Lal Jat despite his election to the Lok Sabha early this year and resignation as a legislator. Her choice for the new faces in the expanded Cabinet is reportedly at variance with that of the central party leadership as also the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the parent organisation of the Sangh Parivar.

In the process, she has annoyed the national leadership and senior party colleagues. It was in this background that when she said in a recent public meeting that the BJP's victory in 163 of 200 Assembly seats and all the 25 Lok Sabha seats in Rajasthan should not be credited to any single person, it was interpreted by many as an attempt to take on Modi. Though she denied the allegation as "misinterpretation by the media", the damage was already done.

When she got the Rajasthan Cricket Association rid of her friend Lalit Modi, former Indian Premier League (IPL) chief, through a coup and replaced him with her crony and head of the state BJP's minority cell, Amin Pathan, many took it as "damage control measure". She had rehabilitated Lalit Modi as RCA president immediately after coming to power, disregarding the fact that this would annoy senior BJP leader and Union finance minister Arun Jaitley whom Modi had, through a series of tweets, accused of selling party tickets in the run-up to the assembly elections last year.

Raje, holding around four dozen portfolios including home, finance, industry, revenue, civil defence, forest, among others, is seen hardly doing justice with any. Consequently, her government has been facing flak for poor governance and deteriorating law and order across the state.

Bureaucracy has gone unbridled. In a review meeting on Wednesday, chief secretary Rajiv Mehrishi was upset to find that most of the departments had failed even to start groundwork on implementing the 200 announcements made by Raje during the much publicised "sarkar aap ke dwar" (the government at your doorstep) campaign. During the campaign, the entire cabinet and top bureaucracy had camped in the three divisions. How Raje copes with these myriad challenges would be interesting to watch during the coming days.