The Congress on Tuesday appointed Tika Ram Jully as the leader of its Legislative Party in the Rajasthan Assembly, making him the first Dalit person to hold the post of Leader of Opposition in the state. Govind Singh Dotasra will continue as the chief of the party’s state unit.

A third-term MLA from Alwar Rural, 43-year-old Jully was the Cabinet minister for Social Justice and Empowerment in the state’s previous Ashok Gehlot government.

After his appointment, Jully said his priority would be “to ensure that the government stays on the right path and doesn’t take anti-people decisions”.

“And if the government forgets the poor or Dalits, the backward, minorities, students, women, the elderly, businessmen, the common man, or people from any section, then we will remind them. (We will) also remind the government that it has been elected for the people and has to work for the people,” he said.

With the Jat-Dalit combination of Dotasra and Jully, the Congress party hopes to consolidate support from these communities in the Lok Sabha elections coming up later this year.

Jully has been active in the public sphere in Alwar even before he became an MLA, organising events such as blood donation camps and mass weddings for women from poor families. He has also been associated with the Meghwal Vikas Samiti, Alwar, an organisation concerned with the upliftment of Dalits.

Between 2005 and 2008, Jully was also the zila pramukh at the Alwar Zila Parishad. He is considered close to Congress leader Jitendra Singh, who is also from Alwar and is said to have had a role in Jully’s appointment as Leader of Opposition.

Jully was first elected to the Assembly in 2008, when he defeated BJP’s Jagdish Prasad by a margin of 8,525 votes (8.69 per cent of total votes). However, he lost the 2013 elections amid a BJP wave to the party’s Jairam Jatav by a margin of 19.18 per cent votes. In the 2018 election, he received nearly half of all votes, defeating his nearest rival, the BJP’s Ramkishan, by a margin of over 15 per cent.

Initially a minister of state in the Ashok Gehlot government, Jully was promoted as a Cabinet minister during the Cabinet expansion in November 2021. He was given three portfolios, including Social Justice and Empowerment.

His stature further rose in the party in December 2023, when he was among just three of the 16 Cabinet ministers – excluding CM Gehlot – to retain their seats in the Assembly election. Apart from Jully, Shanti Dhariwal and Mahendrajeet Singh Malviya were the Cabinet ministers to win, while heavyweights such as B D Kalla, Ramlal Jat, Vishvendra Singh, and Pratap Singh Khachariyawas went on to lose.

In 2010, while he was an MLA, he received his Bachelor in Arts degree from Maharshi Dayanand University in Rohtak, Haryana, and then got an LLB from Rajasthan University in 2015. He got married to Geeta Devi in 1999, and they have two daughters.