MP polls: A troubled Scindia faces twin challenge from voters and BJP old-timers

Scindia, who played a central role in the toppling of the state’s Kamal Nath-led Congress government in March 2020, may have wriggled out of the BJP central leadership’s attempts at fielding him as a candidate in the November 17 polls. Yet, not just in the Gwalior district but across the 34 assembly segments that fall in the wider Gwalior division, the most hotly-debated question this election season is the cost that the Union minister’s political compromises will extract from the illustrious political legacy of the royal surname he wields.

Waning legacy

It is a legacy that has waned greatly since Scindia’s 2019 Lok Sabha defeat from Guna and, more so, in the aftermath of his defection to the BJP. The November 17 polls have exerted a fresh strain on that inherited glory. Scindia’s failure in getting BJP tickets for seven of his loyalists who had walked out of the Congress with him in March 2020 for a saffron waltz has triggered voluble protests against him. On the other hand, over a dozen of his close aides who were named as BJP candidates are facing a poll battle on two fronts – one against their challengers from the Congress and the other against BJP old-timers who continue to see Scindia and his supporters as usurpers.

Scindia has to not just ensure that his loyalists who were successful in getting a BJP ticket go on to win the actual electoral contest but also that his loyalists who were benched by the BJP do not desert him like his other supporters who, over the past few months, have returned to the Congress’s fold.

The protestors who stormed past the main gate of the Jai Vilas Palace, roughed up the palace guards, stopped Scindia’s vehicle, and forced ‘Maharaj’ to sit on the ground to unsuccessfully broker a truce were supporters of former Gwalior East MLA Munnalal Goyal. Goyal, or Munna bhaiya as he is popularly called in Gwalior, was among the 22 MLAs who had followed Scindia into the BJP but, in the bypolls that were necessitated due to the mass defection, he had lost his seat to Satish Sikarwar. When Munna bhaiya had won the Gwalior East seat in the 2018 MP polls, Sikarwar was his challenger from the BJP. But then, just as Goyal switched to the BJP, Sikarwar moved to the Congress and, in the Gwalior East bypoll, defeated the former.

Using his bypoll defeat as an excuse, the BJP denied a ticket to Goyal this time round ostensibly despite strong lobbying for him by Scindia. But what seems to have irked Goyal’s supporters even more is that the party decided to field Scindia’s grand-aunt Maya Singh from Gwalior East. The 73-year-old Maya Singh, a BJP veteran who served multiple terms in the Rajya Sabha and successfully contested a direct election only once – from Gwalior East in the 2013 assembly polls – had virtually withdrawn from politics over the past five years. More importantly, her only electoral victory back in 2013 was against Goyal, who was with the Congress at the time and had lost the election to her by just over 1100 votes – and that too in a recount.

Goyal’s supporters predict massive defeat for BJP’s Maya Singh

The scores of Goyal supporters who heckled Scindia at Jai Vilas Palace – something that no earlier Gwalior royal had faced in the 75 years of the family’s deep association with electoral politics – made no bones about predicting a massive defeat for Maya Singh, who is pitted against Sikarwar in Gwalior East. An embattled Scindia made desperate appeals to the protestors to calm down and when these fell on deaf ears, he had to quite literally fall to his knees in front of his own palace to pacify Goyal’s supporters. All he could tell them was that he had tried his best for a ticket for Goyal but failed, and that he would ensure that the party does good by Munna bhaiya once the polls are over.

Scindia’s appeals have, evidently, had little effect on Goyal’s supporters, who have refused to campaign for Singh. Goyal’s modest house near the Baradari Chauraha in Gwalior’s Morar continues to draw hordes of angry supporters through the day. Though Goyal has refrained from criticising Scindia or the BJP publicly, his supporters have imposed no such filters for themselves.

“The only BJP candidate who can defeat Satish Sikarwar in Gwalior East is Munna bhaiya. Maya Singh stands no chance of winning. The BJP thinks she will win just because she is from the Mahal (a common reference in Gwalior to the royal family), but those days of the Mahal dictating who will win and who will lose ended when Maharaj himself lost the Guna seat. Munna bhaiya has been denied a ticket as part of a conspiracy (gehri saazish hui hai),” Rakesh Tomar, one of Goyal’s supporters, told The Federal.

Another Goyal loyalist, Ravindra Tewari, said, “This is grave injustice and we will make the BJP pay for it. If Munna bhaiya had stayed in the Congress, we are sure he would have got the ticket again. Maharaj became a Union Minister, his people were made ministers in the state and have been given tickets again, but what has Munna bhaiya been given for his loyalty to Maharaj? The BJP is saying Munna bhaiya didn’t get a ticket because he lost the bypoll. But Imarti Devi (another Scindia loyalist) has been given a ticket though she too had lost the bypoll from Dabra.”

In the November 2020 bypolls, seven of the 22 Scindia loyalists who had defected to the BJP were defeated by their Congress counterparts. Besides Goyal and Imarti Devi, the other Scindia supporters who lost the bypolls were Raghuraj Kansana (Morena), Giriraj Dandotiya (Dimani), Ranvir Jatav (Gohad), Jasmant Jatav (Karera), and Adal Singh Kansana (Sumaoli) – all of them from Scindia’s electoral fief of Gwalior division.

Several Scindia loyalists denied tickets by BJP

This time round, with the exception of Imarti Devi and Adal Singh Kansana, the other new entrants who had lost the bypolls have all been denied tickets by the BJP. Additionally, the party has also denied tickets to two other Scindia loyalists, state minister and sitting Mehgaon MLA OPS Bhadoria, and Bhander MLA Raksha Saroniya. Like Goyal, two of the axed MLAs – Giriraj Dandotiya and Ranvir Jatav - have had to make way for BJP old timers, Union minister Narendra Singh Tomar and former member of the Shivraj Singh Chouhan cabinet Lal Singh Arya, respectively.

“The Prime Minister may have massaged Scindia’s ego during his address at the Scindia school’s 125^th anniversary celebrations (on October 21) by calling him Gujarat’s son-in-law and heaping praises on his family, but the fact is that Maharaj does not enjoy the same stature in the BJP that he did in the Congress. He is losing his political hold on Gwalior, and the BJP’s central leadership, by denying tickets to several of his loyalists in the Gwalior division, has signalled that Scindia is just another party leader and enjoys no special clout. No one could have ever imagined that his own supporters would storm Jai Vilas and heckle Scindia. It shows how helpless the BJP has made him, and such protests are bound to adversely impact the victory prospects of those candidates who have managed to get a BJP ticket under the Scindia quota in other assembly segments of the Gwalior division,” says Gwalior-based political commentator Dev Shrimali.

Rakesh Pathak, a veteran journalist who has headed the bureaus of various Hindi newspapers in Gwalior, told The Federal, “Scindia failed to read the public’s sentiment when he switched to the BJP. He assumed that the Congress’s sweep of the Gwalior division in the 2018 polls was solely because of his appeal when, in reality, it was the result of strong anti-BJP sentiments that had been developing here for some time. As BJP leaders, he and his bloc of MLAs have now inherited that anti-BJP mood but they are now at a greater electoral disadvantage than the BJP old-timers.”

“While the public, in general, is still angry at Scindia for betraying the 2018 mandate, the original BJP leaders in the region are refusing to cooperate with him because their electoral turf has been taken over by his men, many of whom used to be the electoral rivals of these same BJP leaders. So, in seats where Scindia’s men have got tickets, they are facing resistance from the voters as well as old BJP cadres, while his people who were denied tickets are now thinking they would have had a better political future had they stuck with the Congress,” Pathak adds.

‘Ghar wapsi’ to the Congress

The precarious situation that Scindia finds himself in, says Pathak, is also the main reason behind the ghar wapsi of several of his supporters who had joined the BJP in 2020 but have now returned to the Congress, with some of them like Baijnath Yadav and Samandar Patel even being given tickets to contest the upcoming polls.

With much to lose, Scindia has been touring the Gwalior division extensively ever since the polls were announced. When not trying to soothe the frayed nerves of his supporters, his schedule is packed with public meetings and karyakartas sammelans (gatherings of BJP cadres) where he exhorts party workers to take charge of the poll preparations from the booth level upwards as “mere senapati” (my generals), with the stench of feudal privilege in this invocation hard to ignore.

Whether his ‘generals’ help the Maharaj of Gwalior recapture his lost ground and secure the other crumbling bastions of his political fiefdom will only be known on December 3, when the results for the MP assembly polls are announced. What is more than evident though is that the immediate battle ahead for Scindia is unlike any that he has faced, so far, in his relatively brief but eventful political crusade of two decades.