Heart of India chooses to remain saffron, and more deeply so

Even as the BJP suffered shocking electoral losses across much of the country’s Hindi Heartland, particularly in the all-important Uttar Pradesh, its bastions of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh stood firmly on the saffron side as the Lok Sabha poll results trickled in on June 4 (Tuesday).

The BJP looked set to wrest all 29 constituencies in Madhya Pradesh, a majority of them with enormous victory margins, and 10 of the 11 seats in adjoining Chhattisgarh.

Naths lose their home turf

The comprehensive victory in MP was made sweeter for the BJP as it finally succeeded in wresting former chief minister Kamal Nath’s home turf of Chhindwara for the first time since 1997. The Chhindwara seat had elected Nath to the Lok Sabha a record nine times — his only loss being in the 1997 bypoll against BJP stalwart Sunderlal Patwa — while his wife, Alka Nath, had won the seat in 1996 and his son, Nakul Nath, made a successful electoral debut from here in 2019.

This time round though, with Nath’s own political standing in the constituency and across MP majorly stunted after he failed to lead the Congress to victory in last year’s Assembly polls and subsequently battled rumours of his possible defection to the saffron fold, Nakul faced a humiliating defeat in Chhindwara. Nakul lost the seat to the BJP’s Vivek ‘Bunty’ Sahu by a margin of over 1.13 lakh votes.

Diggi Raja’s padyatras fail to impress voters

Nath wasn’t the only Congress stalwart in MP or Chhattisgarh who failed to protect his family turf against the saffron tsunami. Nath’s old friend and former MP CM Digvijaya Singh, too, crashed out in the Rajgarh Lok Sabha constituency, which includes the erstwhile Raghogarh principality, of which Digvijaya is the titular Raja. Having lost the 2019 Lok Sabha polls from Bhopal against BJP’s Pragya Thakur, Digvijaya had moved back to the Rajgarh seat this election — he had successfully fought his last Lok Sabha election from here in 1991 — in the hope of reviving his reputation of an electoral warhorse.

Diggi Raja, as he is popularly addressed among supporters, conducted extensive padyatras across Rajgarh to reconnect with voters but his efforts clearly fell short. The Congress stalwart lost the Rajgarh seat to BJP’s Rodmal Nagar, who will now return as the Rajgarh MP for a third consecutive term with a victory margin of over 1.45 lakh votes.

Baghel humbled

In neighbouring Chhattisgarh, the Congress’s other former chief minister, Bhupesh Baghel, also tasted a crushing defeat from the Rajnandgaon constituency, losing to the BJP’s Santosh Pandey by a relatively modest margin of about 45,000 votes. On the eve of counting day, Baghel had alleged that there was a mismatch between the serial numbers of EVMs provided to his polling agents by the EC on voting day and the numbers mentioned on Form 17C provided by the EC days later; insinuating that the voting machines had been replaced or were manipulated with.

Baghel’s senior party colleagues, Tamradhwaj Sahu and Shiv Kumar Dahariya, also lost the polls from Chhattisgarh’s Mahasamund and Janjgir-Champa constituencies, respectively. The candidature of party veterans such as Baghel, Sahu, and Dahariya in the Lok Sabha polls were meant to signal the party’s intent of giving the BJP no quarter in the poll campaign after the Congress suffered a shock defeat in the state’s Assembly polls last December.

However, the results on Tuesday showed that the ground which the Congress had ceded to the BJP six months ago has only slid further away from it. The Korba constituency stood out as the only exception in the state, re-electing incumbent Congress MP Jyotsana Charandas Mahant for a second consecutive term.

Tribal anger

A major factor that led to the Congress’s Assembly poll rout last December was believed to be anger among the state’s tribals against the pro-industry policy measures of Baghel during his chief ministerial tenure. That this anger, coupled with a seemingly enduring appeal of Hindutva and Modi, has continued to hold the BJP in good stead at least in Chhattisgarh — and also MP — can be gauged from the fact that the saffron party practically swept all the tribal-dominated constituencies, wresting even Bastar, a seat won by the Congress in 2019 and from which senior Congress leader Kawasi Lakhma was in the fray this time round.

In Bastar’s adjoining tribal reserved seat of Kanker, though, the Congress’s Biresh Thakur gave the BJP’s Bhojraj Nag a tough contest but eventually lost out by a slender margin of just around 2,000 votes.

Mammoth wins for Shivraj, Jyotiraditya

While the Congress’s former CMs may have had no luck in the two states, their BJP counterpart in MP, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, registered a record of sorts by winning the Vidisha Lok Sabha seat against his Congress rival Pratap Bhanu Sharma with a staggering margin of over 8.21 lakh votes. Chouhan had been eased out of the CM’s office by Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, and JP Nadda when the BJP returned to power in the state last December but his massive victory from Vidisha — though a saffron bastion since 1967 and one he held previously represented for five straight terms — shows that the ‘Mama’ of MP politics continues to hold sway over his electorate like few of his contemporaries do.

It was also a sweet victory for Union minister Jyotiraditya Scindia in Guna, a seat he, as a Congress candidate in 2019, had lost to the BJP. Scindia was accommodated with a ticket from Guna this time after the saffron party benched incumbent MP KP Singh Yadav. The titular Maharaj of Gwalior won back his family turf with a huge margin of 5.40 lakh votes — the highest lead he has had from the seat ever since he made his electoral debut in the 2002 bypoll following the demise of his father, Madhavrao Scindia.

An electorate that overlooks BJP shenanigans

The results in MP, perhaps, also indicate that the state’s electorate has no trouble condoning muscular and even unethical political shenanigans. It had given the BJP a clear mandate in the assembly bypolls of 2021 which were held after the Congress’s Kamal Nath-led government was toppled due to defections and it stood by the saffron party in 2023 when the state went for general elections.

This time round, though, the BJP’s success in bringing the Congress’s Indore Lok Sabha candidate into its fold before polling and the rejection of the candidature of the INDIA bloc’s Khajuraho candidate on evidently specious grounds shocked the nation’s imagination, the voters in MP clearly had no trouble reposing faith in the BJP.

Shankar Lalwani, the BJP’s incumbent MP and candidate in Indore, a saffron bastion for four decades, won the seat with a margin of over 11.75 lakh votes even though his illustrious predecessor and former Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan lent support to the Congress’s appeal to cast votes for NOTA. The Congress may, however, draw some consolation from the fact that its appeal didn’t go entirely in vain as, in a first for Indian democracy, over 2.18 lakh NOTA votes were polled in Indore. In Khajuraho, where the INDIA bloc backed the candidature of Forward Bloc nominee RD Prajapati after the nomination papers of Samajwadi Party’s Meena Yadav were rejected, BJP state unit chief VD Sharma registered an easy victory.