In Rajasthan, Congress’s 26-year-old Dalit face Sanjna Jatav scripts a comeback: Assembly poll loss to MP

Barely six months ago, she had contested her first Assembly election as a Congress candidate and grabbed eyeballs not only for her spirited campaign but also for being among the youngest faces in the fray at just 25.

But when the Assembly poll results came last December, Sanjna Jatav had lost from Alwar’s Kathumar seat to the BJP’s Ramesh Khinchi by just 409 votes. Both Sanjna and her opponent had polled over 79,000 votes. “It was my first Assembly election. I had no experience, yet people gave me lots of love. What’s missing was just luck, nothing else,” she had earlier told The Indian Express.

Her luck was perhaps waiting to smile on her on a bigger stage. In the current Lok Sabha polls, Sanjna, now 26, has won from the Bharatpur constituency on the Congress ticket with a margin of 51,983 votes, polling over 5.79 lakh votes.

The Assembly poll loss helped sharpen Sanjna’s political acumen. Following the December outcome, she had said that she would need to change a few things about her campaign for the Lok Sabha polls, especially the strategy as well as management and strengthening of party workers. Everything seemed to have fallen in place for her.

The Lok Sabha poll win is perhaps the most important milestone in Sanjna’s political journey, who started out as a zila parishad member. She belongs to the Dalit community.

The last time the Congress had held the Bharatpur parliamentary seat was in 2009, when its nominee Ratan Singh had won against the BJP’s Khemchand, with 53.76% vote share. However, in the 2014 and 2019 polls, the BJP secured 60.17% and 61.62% of the votes polled, respectively.

This time, Sanjna garnered 51.29% votes, getting the better of the BJP’s Ramswaroop Koli.

On the ground, what worked in her favour, as