MP Assembly polls: Prahlad Patel faces tough contest in Narsinghpur

As he fights his maiden assembly poll against the Congress’s Lakhan Singh Patel in what resembles a classic David versus Goliath contest, Prahlad is faced with not just the challenge of winning the Narsinghpur seat but, more importantly, of proving to his party bosses that his electoral muscle matches his tall frame.

Speculation that the BJP top brass of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah may pick Prahlad for a “bigger role” once the elections are over ring loud across Narsinghpur, often preceding the candidate’s arrival at a campaign site.

Prahlad’s supporters go village to village in the predominantly rural constituency variously telling locals in hushed tones that if the BJP wins MP, “woh mukhyamantri ban sakte hain (he may be made the CM)” or simply that the voters aren’t electing any ordinary MLA but the next CM.

CM material?

For those who question the BJP’s prospects of victory in the current election given the almost unanimous predictions by various news outlets of a Congress win, the 63-yearold Damoh MP’s drumbeaters have a ready counter. To the doubters, Prahlad’s supporters vaguely suggest that chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan is bound for a national role once the elections conclude and that the BJP decided to field Prahlad, a Lok Sabha MP, in the assembly polls because it had chosen him to strengthen the party and take it forward in the state.

At Narsinghpur’s Khamaria village, where The Federal caught up with his blazing campaign, Prahlad strongly dismissed all rumours about the prominent roles that his party supposedly has in mind for him. “I am neither in the race for chief ministership nor for any other role. The party has fielded me as the candidate from Narsinghpur and my responsibility is to win this seat and, as one of the many star campaigners, of ensuring that we also win in the state. I cannot do anything to stop the rumours; my only commitment is towards fulfilling any responsibility that my leaders give me,” he tells The Federal.

Asked if his maiden assembly battle is different in any aspect from the eight Lok Sabha elections he has contested in his nearly four decades-long political career, Prahlad concedes: “Smaller the constituency, bigger is the challenge... in an assembly election, people expect their candidate to solve every problem – whether it is of roads, water connections, electricity, jobs or anything else... because Jalam (Prahlad’s younger brother Jalam Singh Patel) is the sitting MLA from Narsinghpur and the BJP has been in power at the Centre for over nine years and in the state for over 18 years, it is natural for people to demand an account of what has been done for the constituency; it is my job to convince voters about what we have done.”

Brother Jalam

If Prahlad’s response sounds like a tacit acknowledgement of simmering disaffection among the voters, it is not entirely off the mark. Though Prahlad is contesting his first election from Narsinghpur, the seat has been a stronghold of his brother, Jalam Singh, for nearly two decades. Jalam had first won the Narsinghpur seat in 2003, when Uma Bharti had propelled the BJP to power in the state following a 10-year reign of the Congress’ Digvijaya Singh.

Though he lost the 2008 elections narrowly when he contested as a candidate from Bharti’s Bharatiya Janshakti Party (merged with the BJP in 2011), he won the constituency back five years later on a BJP ticket. In 2018, Jalam was the only BJP candidate in Narsinghpur district who retained his seat, with the Congress wresting the remaining three.

It is not surprising then that Prahlad, who has won his Lok Sabha elections either from the adjoining Damoh seat (in 2014 and 2019) or from Balaghat (in 1989, 1996 and 1999), which is over 200 km from Narsinghpur, has left it to Jalam to plan the finer nuances of his poll campaign. The decision is evidently born more out of compulsion than convenience as Jalam has a better grassroots network than Prahlad, who locals say is a “bada neta” (big leader) who has been “absent from the constituency for years”.

Yet, even as Jalam meticulously plans his elder brother’s campaign schedule and fills in for him when Prahlad is called out to other constituencies with a sizeable backward caste population (particularly of his Lodh/Lodhi community) to canvass for other BJP candidates, there are clear signs of anti-incumbency queering the pitch for the Union minister’s debut assembly contest.

Farmers’ ire

Farmers across the predominantly agrarian Narsinghpur complain of rising debt burden and recall that the only financial relief they received in years was when the Congress, under Kamal Nath, came to power in December 2018 for a brief span of 15 months. “The BJP talks about farmer welfare all the time but does nothing... every single farmer in Narsinghpur is buried under debt and the only time we got some relief was when Congress came to power even though we had voted for the BJP,” says Lala Ram Sahu, a resident of Pipariya village.

In the constituency’s Rakayi hamlet, Antar Singh, a wheat farmer, complained about “power cuts lasting six to eight hours and acute shortage of fertilisers, which we can only buy on the black market” and said he would “rather die than vote for the BJP this time”.

Pitted against Prahlad in the poll battle, the Congress’s Lakhan Singh Patel vociferously raises the issue of farmer distress and “Narsinghpur’s backwardness”; a plank that has begun to gain traction in the constituency days ahead of polling. Lakhan, who had lost the 2018 polls to Jalam by a margin of 14,903 votes, alleged that the Patel brothers “rule Narsinghpur by fear” but expressed hope that “the people will rise up against them this time to defeat Prahlad Patel”.

Unlike Prahlad’s boisterous campaign, which props him up as an electoral heavyweight championing the BJP agenda of protecting Sanatana Dharma, increasing the global prestige of Bharat Mata and preserving “bharatiya sanskriti aur sabhyata (Indian culture and traditions)” – all with the blessings of Narendra Modi, Lakhan’s campaign is both low-key and localised, with an emphasis on “progress of Narsinghpur” and “welfare of farmers and the poor”.

Prahlad, a dexterous political survivor who swiftly transitioned from being a staunch Uma Bharti loyalist to an LK Advani acolyte and now a “disciplined soldier of Narendra Modi”, is visibly favoured in the semi-urban pockets of Narsinghpur. However, a perceptible sense of public sympathy seems to be slowly building towards Lakhan in the rural pockets where villagers speak of giving him a chance because “he lost the last election but is always available to help everyone”.