Diya Kumari

Kumari, 52, is a member of the erstwhile Jaipur royal family. Her paternal grandfather was Man Singh II, the last ruler of Jaipur. Even before the Rajsamand MP was drafted in to contest the Assembly elections — she won the Vidhyadhar Nagar seat in Jaipur by 71,368 votes — she was considered a potential top leader in party circles, with parallels drawn with former CM Vasundhara Raje who is from the erstwhile Gwalior ruling family in Madhya Pradesh and married into the erstwhile royal family of Dholpur in Rajasthan.

As BJP’s announcements finally shut the door on Raje’s hopes, the theory about the BJP propping up Kumari, now a Deputy CM, as the alternative woman royal face to Raje will only grow stronger. The party’s decision to deploy her in the state showed that while the graph of her political career was on the rise, in contrast, Raje, a former two-time CM, was out of favour with the central leadership.

Incidentally, it was Raje who was instrumental in bringing Kumari into the BJP ranks before the 2013 Assembly elections when the former was the party’s CM candidate. Kumari joined the BJP at a rally in her presence, then BJP president Rajnath Singh and current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who at the time was the Gujarat CM. Kumari contested the elections that year from the Sawai Madhopur Assembly constituency and was pitted against both the Congress’s Danish Abrar and veteran tribal leader Kirodi Lal Meena, who contested on a ticket of the National People’s Party (NPP). Kumari defeated her experienced rivals to win Sawai Madhopur.

Kumari did not contest the 2018 Assembly elections in which the Raje-led BJP was voted out of power. In 2019, the party fielded her from Rajsamand in the Lok Sabha polls, which she won by a huge margin.

Since then, Kumari’s importance in the BJP camp has increased. Over the last few years, she has found a place in the party’s state executive as a general secretary, addressed press conferences against the Congress government, and led protests. Despite the 2016 episode, Kumari has refrained from speaking out publicly against Raje or any other state BJP leader.

Kumari’s late father and former titular king of Jaipur, Bhawani Singh, contested the 1989 Lok Sabha elections on a Congress ticket from Jaipur but was defeated by the BJP candidate. Her step-grandmother and former queen of Jaipur, Gayatri Devi, was elected as MP from the Jaipur constituency thrice — in 1962, 1967 and 1971. She won these polls by record margins on the Swatantra Party’s ticket.