As Kirodi Lal Meena drops another bombshell, why the BJP leader is on the warpath against his own govt

In the five years that the BJP was out of power in Rajasthan, starting in 2018, Kirodi Lal Meena filled a vacuum in the state unit as he emerged as the face of street protests against the Ashok Gehlot-led Congress government despite not holding any official position in the party. Now, a state Cabinet minister, Meena, has trained his guns on his own government over alleged corruption, sending ripples through the party at a time when it is in the middle of the Lok Sabha elections.

In two weeks, Meena, the state Agriculture Minister, has written as many letters to Rajasthan Chief Minister Bhajan Lal Sharma. In the first one, dated May 14, Meena flagged a potential loss of Rs 1,146 crore to the exchequer in a multi-storey housing project in the city’s Gandhinagar neighbourhood. The project involves the development of six multi-storey buildings at the Old MREC Campus where several senior government officials live. While four of the six towers will be used for government housing, two are to be sold to private individuals.

On Monday, Meena stepped up the pressure on the government. He wrote to Sharma about an alleged scam worth “billions of rupees” in the Rajasthan State Warehousing Corporation (RSWC). Meena demanded that the government cancel the tender and act against government officials based on a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) audit report.

“Irregularities have been taking place in the execution of works in RSWC for a long time due to which the corporation has suffered a financial loss of billions of rupees. Some officials of the corporation have committed huge irregularities in the construction of a warehouse, giving the warehouse on PPP mode and management of the warehouse on behalf of the MOU partner at the