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By Hemender Sharma: The Congress’s victory in Karnataka has provided the much-needed confidence to the party workers in Madhya Pradesh, which is reflected in the body language and the messaging. “Andar ki baat hai, Bajrang Bali hamare sath hai (the news on the inside is that Lord Hanuman is on our side)” is being forwarded on various platforms among hundreds of other victory messages.
Senior journalist and author Rasheed Kidwai said: “The Congress is in a pole position in Madhya Pradesh because there is a similarity in which Congress governments in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh were brought down. Also Kamal Nath is the accepted and respected leader of the party. There is no visible challenge to him. The Congress identified with the poor and raised local issues in Karnataka. Local leaders were in the forefront so now they have a template. Also the Congress workers now have the confidence that the mighty elections machinery of the BJP can be defeated.”
Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and his party, the BJP, on the other hand are facing four-term anti-incumbency. Chouhan is pinning all his hopes on the Ladli Behan Yojna through which his government plans to transfer Rs 1,000 to one crore women starting next month. A budgetary allocation of Rs 8,000 crore has been made for the scheme this year but Kamal Nath, in an attempt to blunt this, announced his own Nari Samman Yojna under which Rs 1,500 will be given to every woman every month if the Congress comes to power.
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The Congress has already started listing women for this scheme and has additionally promised a gas cylinder for Rs 500. The women voter is the target for both parties.
Senior BJP spokesman Dr Hitesh Vajpayee, however, feels that his party would be quick to learn lessons from Karnataka. “We now know their strategy. And we won’t let them walk away with the pro-poor rhetoric,” he said.
The question that no one in the BJP is willing to answer is: Will local leaders be allowed to take the forefront unlike in Karnataka, where the campaign revolved around Prime Minister Narendra Modi?
The Madhya Pradesh BJP is also facing a peculiar catch 22 situation in 18 Vidhan Sabha constituencies where defectors from the Congress won the 2020 bye-elections on the saffron party’s ticket. If the party gives tickets to these ex-Congressmen again, the original BJP leadership will likely rebel and if the defectors are denied tickets, they too might rebel.
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The case of Deepak Joshi, a three-time MLA from Haat Pipaliya who has served as a minister in the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government in the past and is also the son of former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh Kailash Joshi, serves as the symptom of the problem being faced by the BJP.
Joshi, who joined the Congress last week, had lost the 2018 election to Manoj Chaudhary, who left the Congress in 2020 and won the bye-election on a BJP ticket. Since Chaudhary is most likely to be the BJP candidate again, Joshi had no other option but to join the Congress.
Bye-elections were held in 28 Assembly constituencies in 2020 after Jyotiraditya Scindia quit Congress, bringing down Kamal Nath’s government in the state. While 22 Congress MLAs gave up their Vidhan Sabha membership in March 2020, three more resigned from the Vidhan Sabha to join the BJP by July 2020.
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Elections to three other seats were necessitated because of deaths of the sitting MLAs.
Of the 28 seats, Congress won nine. Of the nine, two were from Agar and Beaora, where the sitting MLAs died and seven were from among the 25 seats for which polls were held due to resignations by sitting MLAs.
The BJP, on the other hand, won 19 seats and 18 of these were won by the Congress in the preceding 2018 elections.
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