The woman who turned Indore into BJP citadel

With the Monsoon Session of Parliament beginning July 18, the spotlight is going to be on Speaker Sumitra Mahajan, the first woman parliamentarian in the country to win eight elections in a row from the same constituency (Indore). Mahajan has written to MPs, entreating them to behave so that the Lower House is not the washout that it has been in the last couple of sessions.

Mahajan belongs to Konkan district in Maharashtra and was married into an Indore family. She rose in politics, largely on the back of municipal politics and has an illustrious history locally. She won the

2014 election by a margin of 466,000 votes, defeating Congress candidate Satyanarayan Patel and joined the elite club of longest-serving parliamentarians. This, when she won the 2009 Lok Sabha elections by a margin of only 11,000 votes.

Mahajan had made a sensational debut in 1989 by defeating Congress stalwart and former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh Prakash Chandra Sethi and securing Indore for the Bharatiya Janata Party for the first time.

Before defeating Sethi, Mahajan had lost an assembly election in 1985 by a narrow margin. After that defeat, she tightened her grip over the constituency and converted Indore into a BJP citadel. In the 2013 Assembly elections, the BJP won seven of the eight Assembly segments under Indore parliamentary seat.

In the eight elections she has contested, Mahajan has always won with a margin of over 100,000 votes, except once. Satyanarayan Patel, who had posed a tough challenge in 2009 and brought down her victory margin, in 2014 lost by a huge margin despite being selected through the US-style primaries promoted by Rahul Gandhi, then Congress vice-president and now its president.

Mahajan has had her share of rivals in the party. Kailash Vijayavargiya (known as bhai) and Mahajan (called tai, meaning elder sister in Marathi) were unforgiving rivals in the same area and the conflict between tai and bhai dogged the BJP for 16 years, especially after her one-time guide and senior BJP leader, the late Rajendra Dharkar turned against her. Dharkar was opposed to Mahajan’s promotion of her son, Mandar, also in politics. Mandar, a pilot and chief flight instructor at the Madhya Pradesh Flying Club, appears to be a politician on the fringes. Mahajan is not likely to contest the next Lok Sabha election and her son is probably going to be the political heir to her seat.

Keen to become Union human resource development minister, she was made Union minister of state for HRD under Murli Manohar Joshi. She remained Union minister of state in three different ministries from 1999 to 2003.

Soft-spoken, Mahajan, a law graduate, has had women followers who have looked up to her as someone who could redress their grievances, be it sexual harassment, domestic violence or career-related issues.

Mahajan is unlikely to contest the 2019 Lok Sabha election and her son will probably be the political heir to her seat