The unlikely rise of Bhajan Lal Sharma – From village sarpanch to Rajasthan CM

Jaipur: A group photo taken at the BJP office here ahead of Tuesday’s legislature party meeting showed Bhajan Lal Sharma in the very last row. An hour or so later, he had jumped places to front and centre stage.

The three central observers sent by the Bharatiya Janata Party from Delhi proposed his name as the leader of the legislature party in Rajasthan, the state it wrested from the Congress in the recent assembly elections.

And the 56-year-old first-time MLA, who represents Jaipur’s Sanganer in the assembly became the chief minister-designate.
Sharma is one of the general secretaries in the state BJP and has kept a low profile.

Considered a hardcore RSS man, Sharma was actively involved in the agitation for the Ram temple in Ayodhya at the site where the Babri mosque stood. In 1992, he spent time in jail for this.

That was around the beginning of his political career. He has also been a village sarpanch twice, starting at the age of 27.

Over the past three decades, Sharma has held various posts in the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) and in the party organisation.

He went to school in the Bharatpur district’s Atari village and Nadbai town.

Later, he joined the Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP), and also took up social causes in Nabadi and Bharatpur.

Sharma actively participated in the 1990 ABVP protest in which thousands of students from across the country gathered in Jammu to march towards Srinagar.

The authorities stopped them, and Sharma was among the several who courted arrest in Udhampur, protesting against attacks on Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley.

Sharma then moved on to the BJYM, the BJP’s youth wing. He was BJYM’s district president thrice before becoming the parent party’s Bharatpur district secretary and its district president.

Leaving Bharatpur for the BJP’s Rajasthan headquarter, Sharma became the party’s state vice president, and is now a general secretary in the state BJP.

Sharma holds a masters’ degree in political science and runs an agriculture supplies business.

The BJP won 115 of the 199 seats on which polling took place in the November assembly elections in Rajasthan. The BJP also won the elections in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.