Jaipur: After a gap of 48 years, the Jaipur Lok Sabha seat will have a woman candidate from a national party contesting the general elections.The last time a woman candidate contested and won from here was Gayatri Devi, the erstwhile queen of Jaipur, in the 1971 general elections. She contested on the ticket of Swatantra Party of C Rajagopalachari. The ex-royal was elected from Jaipur thrice in a row — in 1962, 1967 and 1971. Gayatri Devi was put in jail in 1975 during the Emergency, after which she retired from politics.Now, the Congress has nominated former Jaipur mayor Jyoti Khandelwal from the seat, which is considered a BJP bastion. BJP has repeated its sitting MP Ramcharan Bohra, a Brahmin, from here. Jyoti’s political fortunes took off in Congress after her surprise win in the direct mayoral elections in 2009. She defeated BJP’s Suman Sharma by over 13,500 votes. Her tenure as mayor was tumultuous, marked by several controversies and fights with the bureaucrats. She wanted to contest the last assembly election from a Jaipur seat, but the Congress denied her the ticket. Jyoti created a storm, petitioned the AICC against the local leaders and even threatened to resign from the party.The Jaipur Lok Sabha seat has been traditionally allotted to a Brahmin, in the largely caste-driven politics of the state. In the nine parliamentary elections held from 1984 to 2014, the seat has always elected a Brahmin candidate, be it of Congress or of BJP. Between 1989 and 2014, BJP’s Girdhari Lal Bhargava won the seat six times in a row.Congress’ Brahmin candidate, Mahesh Joshi, last won it in 2009. He is presently an MLA and party’s chief whip in the assembly. In 1977 and 1980, Satish Agarwal won from here, once on the ticket of Bharatiya Lok Dal and once as Janata Party candidate. The Congress has gone for a Vaishya or Mahajan candidate this time, considering the community’s significant presence here. The Congress has won the seat just thrice in the past — Daulat Ram (1951), Naval Kishore Sharma (1984) and Mahesh Joshi (2009).The ruling party in the state hopes to capture it again this time, hinging on the fact that its candidates are presently MLAs from five out of the eight assembly segments in the parliamentary constituency. “After 48 years, the voters in Jaipur have got a chance to send a woman to the Lok Sabha. This is a rare chance. I hope women and men in large numbers will vote for Congress,” said Jyoti, talking to TOI on Friday.“The Congress seems to have taken a calculated risk this time by nominating a Vaishya to the seat. Vaishya community is traditionally considered a BJP vote-base. With the nomination of Jyoti Khandelwal, Congress hopes to garner the community’s votes in its favour, in addition to its traditional voters like the minorities,” said a veteran journalist Milap Chand Dandiya.

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