The Congress has maintained its track record of giving ticket to at least one Muslim candidate in the Lok Sabha election in Rajasthan by fielding Rafique Mandelia from Churu.
Mr. Mandelia lost the 2009 Lok Sabha election and was defeated in the Churu Assembly constituency in the 2018 election by a narrow margin of 1,850 votes. His father, Maqbool Madelia, won the 2008 Assembly election, defeating Harlal Saharan of the BJP in Churu.
Rajasthan has had only one Muslim Lok Sabha member so far. Ayub Khan won the Jhunjhunu seat in 1984 and 1991 on Congress ticket and served as the Minister of State for Agriculture in the P.V. Narasimha Rao government.
The war hero of 1965, who was awarded the Vir Chakra for destroying four Pakistani tanks and capturing one in the Sialkot sector, died at the age of 84 in his village of Nuah in Jhunjhunu district on September 15, 2016.
Till the 1980s, the Congress preferred to give ticket to a Muslim from the Marwar region in western Rajasthan. The party later fielded candidates from Churu, Jhunjhunu, Bharatpur, Jhalawar, Ajmer and Jaipur. However, Muslim candidates lost by a big margin even in Muslim-majority constituencies in most of the elections.
The Congress fielded cricketer Mohammed Azharuddin from Tonk-Sawai Madhopur in 2014.
Among the 25 Lok Sabha seats in the State, as many as 11 are considered to have a significant percentage of Muslim voters. The State has 11.4% minority population, mostly Muslims, as per the 2011 census.
