A king is a king and he also remains the ruler. The fact that for 14 centuries the family of Maharaja Vishvender Singh ruled over Bharatpur is the only fact that the voters of this constituency need to know.

As the maharaja moves from village to village asking, mind you, not for votes but only ‘ashirwad’, the villagers throng to catch a glimpse of the king and only the lucky few get to touch his feet. “You need not have come all the way to ask for votes. You should have just issued an order and we would have done it,” assures the frenzied crowd.

The days of the Raj are obviously not over, at least not in this part of the country. As the Tribune team trails his campaign, it’s difficult to remain objective and not be impressed with the sheer strength of the traditional hold that even a powerless king has over his ‘praja’. “Vishevender has lost elections only once ever since he joined active politics in the late 1980s and that too by only 800 votes. It happened because his supporters did not go out to vote thinking a maharaja does not need votes to rule,” explains Chunni Kaptan of Rarha village.

And sure enough, in every village, where the maharaja addresses the multitude, including hundreds of veiled women and dusty children, one instruction is clear: “Please do cast you vote, even kings need them.”

“It’s not just about being a king,” says the maharaja. “For a politician it pays to be humble and that is why I am here among the people,” he adds in his cultured English tones. But the moment he is on the raised platform under some village tree, he breaks into pure Rajasthani battering his opponent Dr Digambar Singh of the BJP to pieces.

For the maharaja, the past months have not been easy but its nothing that he is not used to. Never a strictly ‘single-party' man the maharaja and his family has fought elections in the Bharatpur- Deeg- Kumher area on the Congress, the INLD, the Janta Dal and the BJP tickets. A sitting BJP MP from Bharatpur till recently, Vishvender was hoping for a BJP ticket to the assembly. “My parliamentary constituency has been reserved and I had made it clear to Vasundhra Raje that I will not leave my seat. I had a heart attack and was convalescing in Delhi when I was told that she had given the ticket to her favourite ministers,” he says.

Vishvender got the Congress ticket from the area and is now going full guns in retaining his dominance over the Jats in the area. “I would be lying if I say that elections are held on development issues. In fact, we have reached a stage in electoral politics, where caste and religion are the only two moving factors left and we are all to be blamed for it,” he says.

“If we talk about real issues like water and irrigation, the people will talk about them. Instead we have psyched the voter into thinking on caste lines,” he says candidly.

Critical of the BJP government and the Raje, whose political advisor he was till less than a month ago, the maharaja says the lady lost the vision she once had for the state. “She surrounded herself with sycophants and the vision got clouded. The government came up with good schemes and projects but it failed to implement and monitor them,” he says.