Elections 2024: Where All in MP Can the Congress Party Resist the Saffron Tide?

Kamal Nath and Digvijay Singh.

(Photo: Namita Chauhan/The Quint)

With the election hysteria reaching its crescendo, the Hindi heartland's politics is buzzing with only one question. Would it be a clean sweep for the Bharatiya Janata Party or will the Congress offer any resistance?

In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls in Madhya Pradesh, 28 out of the 29 seats went in favour of the BJP. Only Kamal Nath’s Chhindwara remained an impregnable fort.

Since 1952, the BJP has been successful in winning this seat only once, and that too in a by-poll in 1997. Kamal Nath and his family (his wife in 1996 and his son Nakul Nath in 2019), have been successfully holding the fort since 1980. This time, the Congress is giving the responsibility to Nakul Nath again.

But the BJP too is attempting to rain all its political ammunition on the Nath family's stronghold.

The Seats to Watch are Chhindwara and Rajgarh

On 15 April, four days before polling, a police team turned up at Kamal Nath’s bungalow in Chhindwara following a complaint by BJP candidate Vivek Bunty Sahu, who accused a top aide of Nath of conspiring to circulate a fake obscene video of him. After the polling, Yadav said, “We have already won Chhindwara, only the results are awaited.”

If this happens, will the BJP succeed in planting lotuses in all 29 seats? BJP sources stated that they can’t say this for sure. Other than Chhindwara, there are a few more seats where the Congress is giving good competition to the saffron party. These include two Lok Sabha seats reserved for tribals — Mandla and Dhar, and also Morena in the Chambal region and Rajgarh (where Digvijaya Singh is contesting).

Despite a Ram temple-driven saffron surge, the communal divide coupled with the Modi Ki Guarantee slogan, sources within the BJP admit that "the credibility of individual candidates and their image would also come into consideration when people go to vote."

Besides Chhindwara, the Rajgarh parliamentary seat is witnessing an interesting contest. The Congress party's Digvijaya Singh, a Rajya Sabha member, is facing the might of the BJP, whose candidate Rodmal Nagar, who has won twice in 2014 and 2019, has been fielded again and is banking heavily on the three aforementioned factors.

Digvijaya’s son, Jaiwardhan, is an MLA from Raghogarh which is one of the assembly segments of the Rajgarh Lok Sabha seat. Digvijaya, who represented the seat twice in 1984 and 1991, also has a strong support base in Susner, Khilchipur, and Chachoura assembly seats.

“Both the people and the party workers are unhappy with Rodmal Nagar. He would never cooperate with us”, a party member in Rajgarh said. Digvijaya, 77, has also struck an emotional chord with voters saying that this would be his last election. “Next time, I will be too old to contest one”, he said.

Though the polling in Rajgarh will be held on 7 May, conditions look favourable for Digvijaya as of now.

Every Seat in MP is Crucial for 'Abki Baar 400 Paar'

In Morena, the BJP is facing stiff resistance from Nitoo Singh Sikarwar who was thrown out by the saffron party in the 2020 assembly by-elections for allegedly sabotaging the party's candidates in the Gwalior and Chambal regions. Sikarwar comes from an influential political family of Morena which was once famous for the Chambal Valley dacoits.

He is giving a tough fight to Shivmangal Singh Tomar. The entry of a local businessman, Rameshchandra Garg as a Bahujan Samaj Party candidate has made the contest even more interesting. “Garg is likely to make a dent in the traditional urban Baniya votes for the BJP”, political observers in Morena told me.

Another BJP candidate facing an uphill task is former Union minister Faggan Singh Kulaste. Contesting from the Mandla seat (reserved), Kulaste was defeated in the Vidhan Sabha elections in 2023 from the Niwas assembly seat with a margin of over 9000 votes. Located about 62 km from the world-famous Kanha National Park, Mandla is home to the Baiga and Gond tribes. Congress candidate Omkar Markam is the sitting MLA from the Dindori assembly segment and is quite popular among the tribals.

Dhar, in Western MP, is also making the BJP jittery. The party had lost five out of its eight assembly segments in the 2023 polls. The polling for the Lok Sabha elections will take place in the last phase of the schedule.

So far, PM Narendra Modi may have visited Madhya Pradesh five times, addressing the same number of rallies combined with road shows, but he has not visited Chhindwara where Home Minister Amit Shah spent a night holding discussions with the CM Mohan Yadav and other senior party functionaries before the 19 April polling. Party president J P Nadda also addressed a rally.

Modi, Shah, and Nadda are also scheduled to visit Madhya Pradesh many more times before the last phase of the polling on 13 May because every single seat of the Hindi heartland is important for Modi to achieve Abki Baar 400 Paar. CM Mohan Yadav and the BJP’s state unit president V D Sharma have also promised a garland of 29 lotuses to the trio.

(The author is a senior journalist based in Madhya Pradesh. This is an opinion article and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)