The Congress may have won Rajasthan, but that does not mean the business of politicking is over and that the business of administration has begun. The Rajasthan Congress legislature party, or CLP, meets today to consider the various possibilities for the state’s chief minister; their deliberations will be watched over, carefully, by a team from the All India Congress Committee led by the AICC’s general secretary, Digvijay Singh. This is, we are told, how the Congress always does things; why would there be any reason to change?

As the grand old party regularly seems to discover but never seems to internalise, there are always reasons to change. A look at why there’s been a delay in Rajasthan might make it clear what these are. Why, indeed, would Sheila Dikshit be confirmed speedily as the leader of the Delhi CLP (this time round she was not made to wait a pointless few days, as she was last time) while Ashok Gehlot, the front-runner for leader of the Rajasthan CLP and thus for chief minister, is made to wait? Clearly the concern isn’t merely ensuring that state leaders know that the Congress’s central leadership is in command. No, the biggest reason appears to be that the Congress is postponing picking a CM because it wants to minimise the impact any choice might have on its support in Jat communities across the state, especially given the Lok Sabha polls expected early next year. The Congress, once a strong contender for their votes, believes that it has lost ground in recent years: this time, less than half the Jat candidates put up by the party won. This argument is not really persuasive. To start with, if Jat candidates did not win, there is no reason to suppose that a Jat chief minister would make a difference to the

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