Jaipur, Dec. 3: The Congress appears to have a clear edge over the ruling BJP in tomorrow’s Rajasthan polls that many believe could be a referendum on terror — “state terror”.

The voting in Madhya Pradesh on November 27 and Delhi two days later was too close to the 26/11 Mumbai attacks to make a substantive political impact. Or rather, nobody could assess how the strikes would affect voters. A week on, the Mumbai siege is sinking in minds.

In Rajasthan, though, the talking point isn’t so much the Mumbai rampage as “state terror” — a reference to 22 police firings during the five years that Vasundhara Raje has been at the helm.

The number of casualties is disputed, with the Congress claiming the authorities scaled down death figures in the three-month Gujjar-Meena clashes this year.

But the verdict seems unambiguous. “This is the bloodiest government we have seen in living memory,” said Banwari Lal Sharma, a grocery vendor in Dubbigaon in Dausa, the epicentre of the long-drawn caste war.

People speak of how the chief minister spared no protester. Upper-caste Brahmins and Rajputs who hit the streets to get reservation, promised by the BJP in 2003, for the economically backward castes were baton-charged. Peasants of Tonk, near Jaipur, and those in Gharsana-Rawla, were shot at while protesting for water. This time, the chief minister is up against a sharply fractured polity, with the state expected to vote along caste lines like never before. The Assembly has 200 seats.

In the last polls, the Congress lost much of its committed scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and Jat votes (Muslims alone stayed) to the BJP, thanks to a combination of astute social engineering and the projection of Raje as an “eclectic” caste leader —a Rajput by birth and a Jat by marriage, with a Gujjar daughter-in-law to boot. But now, her rainbow coalition has unravelled. The Jats, SCs and STs have largely returned to the Congress, as have the dominant backward castes like the Bishnois.

In 2003, the Bishnois were annoyed with the Congress for not taking a stand on the Salman Khan black buck shooting case. The group worships the animal.

Raje allegedly instigated the Gujjar-Meena agitation over the question of giving ST status to the former.

BJP sources acknowledged she uncorked the caste genie without crafting an alternative social coalition that parties normally do when they play this kind of politics.

Her adventurism has cost the BJP the support of both the castes, who despite being sworn enemies, will vote the Congress.