Mamaji image, public sympathy make Chouhan invincible in Vidisha, MP

“Pandit ji, aap toh aaraam karo; yahaan kuch nahi hona... Mama hi jeetega (Take rest, Pandit ji, nothing will happen here... Mama will win)”, Hariram Patel, a mechanic in Nasrullahganj village of Madhya Pradesh’s Vidisha Lok Sabha constituency tells 77-year-old Pratap Bhanu Sharma. Sharma is the Congress candidate from Vidisha against BJP’s Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the longest serving chief minister of Madhya Pradesh who was eased out of office by his party’s central leadership last December and replaced with Mohan Yadav.

Rival's turf?

As Sharma moves on with his jansampark, flanked by a few dozen Congress workers lazily trailing him, Patel tells this reporter that he meant no disrespect to the septuagenarian leader who happens to be the only Congress leader to have won the Vidisha Lok Sabha seat since it came into existence in 1967.

Sharma’s Vidisha victories, however, are still seen as an aberration in this BJP bastion; coming as they did in the 1980 and 1984 General Elections, the former conducted after the collapse of the Janata government and the latter in the aftermath of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination.

How Chouhan landed in Vidisha

In 1991, Chouhan’s Lok Sabha poll debut from Vidisha at the age of 32 – he was then an upcoming youth leader who had won his first term as an MLA from Budhni a year earlier but was still known largely in the state as a protégé of BJP and RSS stalwart Kushabhau Thakre – had come by an interesting turn of fate. In the Lok Sabha elections held earlier that year, BJP stalwart Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then a Rajya Sabha member, had chosen Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh and Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, to return to electoral politics following his shock defeat from Gwalior in 1984 against Congress’s Madhavrao Scindia. Vajpayee won from both the constituencies but chose to give up Vidisha, necessitating a by-poll in which the influential Thakre is learnt to have pushed for Chouhan’s candidature.

Notably, both times – Vajpayee’s Vidisha election and in the subsequent bypoll contested by Chouhan – the challenger from the Congress was Pratap Bhanu Sharma, the former two-term Vidisha MP who, after spending the past several years in political wilderness, has now resurfaced as Chouhan’s current poll rival.

Surprise win over Sharma in 1991

In Budhni, the assembly segment in Vidisha Lok Sabha constituency that Chouhan currently represents, BJP worker Ajab Singh Yadav who has actively worked in poll campaigns since the 1989 general elections recalls, “when Chouhan first contested from Vidisha in 1991, he had two advantages – he was contesting a seat that was known to be a BJP bastion and he was taking over from Vajpayee; but he was not the larger than life leader that he is today... in fact, at that time, we were worried that he may lose because Sharma was a known name in Vidisha, had already been MP twice and was generally well-liked because he had done some good work for the constituency”.

When the bypoll results came in, Yadav says, “we were all surprised” because even though the Congress had come to power at the Centre with PV Narasimha Rao as prime minister, “Vidisha bucked the trend of bypoll results generally favouring whichever party is in government... Chouhan won hands down; he defeated Sharma by almost 90,000 votes, which was unexpected because Vajpayee’s winning margin against Sharma was just about a lakh... all of us had thought that even if Chouhan wins, he will barely make it”.

“Jab woh kuch nahi the tab inko itni buri tarah haraya tha; ab toh woh rashtriya neta hain... kya hoga soch lo... yahaan chunav sirf jeet ki margin ka hai (when Chouhan was a nobody, he had defeated Sharma comprehensively; now that Chouhan is a national leader, you can imagine what the poll outcome would be... the election here is merely to decide Chouhan’s victory margin,” Surendra Patwa, a former member of Chouhan’s cabinet and MLA from Vidisha’s Bhojpur assembly segment, told The Federal.

‘Tough battle, but will fight it for Congress,’ says Sharma

The mild-mannered Sharma knows he is up against a rival who comes with an aura of invincibility even if many believe Chouhan, who served as the Madhya Pradesh chief minister for 16 years and is credited with turning the state into a bankable saffron citadel, was being forced out of state politics by the Narendra Modi and Amit Shah duo.

“I know it is a tough seat and that circumstances aren’t favourable but the party has entrusted me with the responsibility of contesting from Vidisha and I will give the fight everything I have because I do not run away from a challenge... even when I contested from here in 1980, nobody thought the Congress could win Vidisha but I won,” Sharma said.

The Congress candidate conceded that the “political situation in 2024 cannot be compared to that of 1980 or even 1991 when I lost to Vajpayee ji” and said, “it is far more difficult for the Congress now because the BJP has captured everything from the government and the media to constitutional institutions and probe agencies”.

Sharma slaps ‘lack of development,’ calls Vidisha BJP’s ‘safe seat’

Sharma alleges that despite being a “VIP seat”, Vidisha has been “left far behind in terms of development” and claims that “it was during my 10 years as Vidisha MP that the foundation of development was laid here”.

Sharma says it was between 1980 and 1989, when he served as Vidisha MP, that “electrification went up from a meagre 14 per cent to over 80 per cent, government schools and hospitals were built and work on metalling of roads was sanctioned”.

The BJP leaders who won from here subsequently, be it Vajpayee, Sushma Swaraj or even Chouhan, saw Vidisha as nothing more than a “safe seat” to win elections from but “did only token development for the constituency,” the Congress veteran alleges, adding that although Chouhan was the MLA from Vidisha’s Budhni throughout his tenure as chief minister, “even Budhni did not see the kind of progress one expects to see in a chief minister’s pocket borough”.

Sharma’s assertions about Vidisha’s lacklustre progress aren’t entirely off the mark. A predominantly agrarian and semi-rural constituency, industrial development in Vidisha has largely been concentrated within the assembly segments of Bhojpur and Vidisha. The other six assembly segments of Basoda, Ichhawar, Khategaon, Silwani, Budhni and the world renowned Buddhist destination of Sanchi continue to be dependent on an agricultural economy, replete with problems of increasing loan burden on farmers and recurring crop failures.

Locals devoted to BJP despite no signs of progress

Locals concede the area, given its high profile MPs of the past and Chouhan’s deep association, could have achieved much more but insist that they remain politically committed to the BJP.

“There is no denying that Vidisha has lagged far behind places such as Bhopal, Indore, Jabalpur and Gwalior,” says Basoda resident Ram Avtar Patel, a grocery shop owner, adding that barring good bypasses and highways that criss-cross the constituency, “there is no real sign of progress”. Ram Avtar says his assembly segment has “no good school or college and no good hospital... bekaari-berozgaari bhi bahut hai (there is severe unemployment too”. Yet, Ram Avtar is certain that Chouhan will “win with the highest margin” among all 29 BJP candidates of the state.

Voters sympathise, fancy ‘cabinet’ roles for Chouhan

While Vidisha has been a saffron citadel for the past six decades, cultivated aggressively by the RSS and its affiliate organisations, much of the current electoral euphoria around the party is due to Chouhan’s candidature and a palpable sympathy for him ever since he was benched as chief minister despite the BJP relying heavily on his flagship schemes to retain power in the state.

“It would have been better had he been allowed to continue as the chief minister; he is the true vikas purush (development man) of Madhya Pradesh and all of Vidisha is proud of him but now that he has been made a Lok Sabha candidate, every voter in Vidisha feels it is her/his duty to ensure Chouhan wins by a landslide,” says Bhojpur-based businessman Anand Goyal.

Local BJP workers have also been going around the constituency telling voters that by voting for Chouhan, they won’t just be electing an MP but a “cabinet minister” since “Modi is set to return to power for a third term and he will definitely give Chouhan an important role in his new cabinet”.

Some overzealous party workers even go to the extent of predicting that the former chief minister, who presided over impressive agricultural growth in the state over the past 15 years, could be made the agriculture minister if Modi returns to power.

Winning mantras

What is surprising, though, is that despite a visible groundswell of support for him, Chouhan isn’t resting on the certainty of his imminent victory. Still in high demand among BJP candidates across the state who want him to campaign for them, Chouhan has been judiciously taking time out of his packed schedule to canvass extensively across Vidisha; almost always with his wife, Sadhna Singh, in tow.

Why ‘jilted’ Chouhan turned a new leaf

If, in the immediate aftermath of the BJP denying him another stint as chief, Chouhan’s public utterances seemed like those of a jilted leader – he would often rue the fact that his photo had gone missing from BJP posters or that party colleagues who he had once inducted into his cabinet no longer gave him the same importance as they did before – that frustration has all but evaporated from his current campaign.

Aware that he may no longer command the same authority over BJP cadres that he did during his chief ministerial tenure, the former chief minister is also making sure to stridently court his party workers in Vidisha.

“He has addressed karyakarta sammelans (worker conventions) across all assembly segments of Vidisha and he makes sure that every worker who wishes to meet him gets a personal audience. During karyakarta sammelans, he always gets off the stage and goes among the workers, often showering flower petals or throwing garlands at them. This helps him strengthen his bond with the ordinary worker because he knows that ultimately it is the worker who brings the voter to the polling booth on voting day,” a close aide of Chouhan told The Federal.