Om Singh, an advocate in Sikar, cannot think of voting against the BJP “even if you chop off my hands”.

“I come from a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Jana Sangh family,” he explains.

But he is hesitant to predict a BJP victory in the December 7 Rajasthan elections. “My entire family will vote for the BJP but I’m afraid the party may not return to power.”

He blames chief minister Vasundhara Raje. “If the BJP fails, it will be because of her. People are more angry with Vasundhara than with the BJP.”

Most BJP supporters believe the party is unlikely to buck the two-decade-old trend in Rajasthan of voting out the incumbent. They all blame Vasundhara.

“The BJP would have returned to power had the party changed the chief minister. I don’t know why (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi and (BJP president Amit) Shah lacked the courage to drop her,” Yogesh Sharma, who claimed to be associated with the Sangh, said in Bikaner.

A state unit lobby had demanded a leadership change ahead of the Assembly elections but Modi and Shah gave out mixed signals and later chose to stick with Vasundhara.

Party managers in Jaipur said the leadership had “no alternative”. One of them said: “Who could have replaced her? It could have led to rebellion and chaos.”

But ask the voters why they dislike the chief minister so much and they fail to come up with specifics, resorting to broad-brush charges like “betrayal”, “arrogance” and “negligence”.

“She made a lot of promises but fulfilled none,” said Prakash Mathur in Nokha. Asked which promises he was referring to, Mathur spoke vaguely about the promises of jobs and freebies for the poor.

“She doesn’t meet anyone. Everyone knows: ‘8pm, no CM’,” said Sher Singh, a driver in Jaipur.

Many people alleged that the government machinery had broken down over the past five years and there was rampant corruption. Angry farmers in Churu claimed the process of crop procurement against the minimum support price was “riddled with corruption”.

A bureaucrat in Jaipur suggested that the roots of the hostility to Vasundhara lay in Rajasthani society’s deeply entrenched patriarchy, with its resentment of a woman chief minister, particularly one who chose to be upfront in her approach.

Aware of Vasundhara’s unpopularity, party strategists are trying to hitch the state BJP’s wagon to Modi, whose personal appeal remains intact, at least among BJP voters.

The Prime Minister himself has been appealing to the voters to “strengthen Modi’s hands” by voting for the BJP in Rajasthan.

“The Congress is constantly abusing me. A Congress government in the state will lead to regular friction with the Centre,” he said in Nagaur.

“Rani teri khair nahi, Modi tujhse bair nahi (We have no enmity with Modi but will not spare the Queen),” goes a slogan popular among some BJP supporters. Vasundhara, a member of the erstwhile royal family of Gwalior, is popularly known as “Rani”.

If Modi’s charisma is one of the pillars of the BJP’s attempts to beat the anti-incumbency, the other is the Ram temple. Modi has been accusing the Congress of intimidating Supreme Court judges into delaying a decision on the Ayodhya dispute.

The Sangh, which has taken up the temple agenda aggressively, has unleashed its cadres to try and convince the voters that a BJP defeat in Rajasthan will weaken the cause of the Ram temple.

Party managers from Delhi who are camping in the state feel the campaign, masterminded by Shah, has begun to turn the tide in the BJP’s favour.

“The stock market and surveys by news channels have shown that our situation is improving,” a BJP strategist said. “We are catching up and, God willing, may snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.”

Party managers are also pinning their hopes on the reports of rebellions in the Congress and the well-known division between the camps of the two chief ministerial aspirants, the veteran Ashok Gehlot and the upcoming Sachin Pilot. The Congress has not declared a chief ministerial candidate.

“We are still trailing but have managed to narrow the gap to a respectable level. With a week left, we might even nick it,” a BJP senior said.