Barely six months ago, she had contested her first Assembly election as a Congress candidate and grabbed eyeballs not only for her spirited campaign but also for being among the youngest faces in the fray at just 25.
But when the Assembly poll results came last December, Sanjna Jatav had lost from Alwar’s Kathumar seat to the BJP’s Ramesh Khinchi by just 409 votes. Both Sanjna and her opponent had polled over 79,000 votes. “It was my first Assembly election. I had no experience, yet people gave me lots of love. What’s missing was just luck, nothing else,” she had earlier told The Indian Express.
Her luck was perhaps waiting to smile on her on a bigger stage. In the current Lok Sabha polls, Sanjna, now 26, has won from the Bharatpur constituency on the Congress ticket with a margin of 51,983 votes, polling over 5.79 lakh votes.
The Assembly poll loss helped sharpen Sanjna’s political acumen. Following the December outcome, she had said that she would need to change a few things about her campaign for the Lok Sabha polls, especially the strategy as well as management and strengthening of party workers. Everything seemed to have fallen in place for her.
The Lok Sabha poll win is perhaps the most important milestone in Sanjna’s political journey, who started out as a zila parishad member. She belongs to the Dalit community.
The last time the Congress had held the Bharatpur parliamentary seat was in 2009, when its nominee Ratan Singh had won against the BJP’s Khemchand, with 53.76% vote share. However, in the 2014 and 2019 polls, the BJP secured 60.17% and 61.62% of the votes polled, respectively.
This time, Sanjna garnered 51.29% votes, getting the better of the BJP’s Ramswaroop Koli.
On the ground, what worked in her favor, as per Sanjna herself, was that wherever she went, the people saw her as their “daughter” or “bahu”. It also helped that she had a clean image and brought a freshness to the election. “I’m personally in touch with everyone, and they don’t feel I’m a politician or someone different from them,” she said.
It was a combination of factors that propelled her candidature from the Bharatpur seat. The Congress bigwigs had shied away from contesting the Lok Sabha polls as the BJP had bagged all 25 seats in the state in the last two elections, thereby opening up opportunities for young leaders like Sanjna, who had already put up a notable fight in the Assembly. elections.
She had also been engaged in Priyanka Gandhi’s “Ladki Hoon Lad Sakti Hoon” campaign, and had the backing of at least two senior Congress leaders in the region — AICC general secretary Bhanwar Jitendra Singh, and former MP and minister Vishvendra Singh of the erstwhile Bharatpur royal family.
Just around the Assembly polls, she had also met Priyanka and Rahul Gandhi. “Priyanka ji spoke about promoting women power, and how women should come forward and take what’s theirs. I also met Rahul ji around the Assembly election period, in Delhi,” Sanjna had said when her candidature was announced.
Perhaps, the real inspiration for her was closer to home. She says her father Harbhajan is a thekedar (contractor) who has been an up-sarpanch, while her uncle Kamal Singh has been a sarpanch of Samoochi village in Alwar. “Growing up, I saw my family, especially my father and uncle, serve the people. So, I wanted to follow in their footsteps,” she said.
So even as she pursued her studies, her political aspirations did not leave her. She says she completed her BA from Gandhi Jyoti College in Bhusawar, Bharatpur, which is affiliated to Maharaja Surajmal Brij University, also in Bharatpur, and then got a degree in Law from Lords University in Alwar.
Her first electoral contest was for the Alwar zila parishad in 2021, where she won from the ward number 29 by 4,661 votes.
On getting a Lok Sabha ticket from Bharatpur and not Alwar, she had said that she originally hails from Bhusawar under Bharatpur’s Weir Assembly seat.
Besides father Harbhajan and mother Ramvati Devi, her family comprises her brothers, and husband Kaptan Singh, a constable with Rajasthan Police posted in Alwar’s Thanagazi. The couple has two children, a six-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter.