Two for the Cause
A Congress win in the Chitrakoot bypoll has upped the stakes for the big fight with the BJP in 2018
The state’s ruling BJP should be worried, the Congress party has won two assembly byelections in Madhya Pradesh on the trot. The Congress’s Nilanshu Chaturvedi defeated the BJP’s Shankar Dayal Tripathi in the Chitrakoot bypolls in Satna district by 14,133 votes.
In a previous byelection, the Congress had retained the Ater assembly segment.
Chitrakoot fell vacant after incumbent MLA Prem Singh passed away in May earlier this year. For the Congress, the byelection was a test for Opposition leader Ajay Singh — the seat fell in the Vindhya region, where he is considered inf luential. Singh handled the Congress campaign singlehandedly with other big state leaders like Jyotiraditya Scindia and Kamal Nath making only brief appearances during the campaign. Singh not only prevented a BJP victory but also ensured an increase in the Congress’s victory margin, by close to 4,000 votes.
And it’s not like the BJP didn’t pull out all the stops in trying to ensure a victory. Since the area is close to Uttar Pradesh, even
Yogi Adityanath, the state chief minister, and his deputy, Keshav Prasad Maurya, were roped in to campaign in Chitrakoot. There were some murmurs that the BJP candidate, Tripathi, was not Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s choice, but after his return from the US, the CM too had camped in the constituency for three days. State BJP president Nand Kumar Singh Chouhan said the party would “look into the causes of the defeat at Chitrakoot. It is a traditional Congress seat... the results will have no bearing on the 2018 elections”.
The Congress, however, feels that the party’s victory is a sign of thing to come. “The CM’s face is not working anymore. The people want change,” says Congress spokesperson Pankaj Chaturvedi.
The results have raised the stakes for the two other byelections coming up in the next couple of months. Both constituencies, Mungaoli and Kolaras, come under Jyotiraditya Scindia’s Guna Lok Sabha seat. The two MLAs who passed away, necessitating the bypolls, were from the Congress, and owed allegiance to him. The elections promise to be a close contest, with the BJP already dispatching known Congress baiters, minister Jaibhan Singh Pawaiya and Rajya Sabha MP Prabhat Jha, to the area. The bypolls are sure to be read as a battle between CM Chouhan and Scindia, who is being spoken of as the Congress’s chief ministerial face. The results should give us a peek into what’s in store in 2018 when the state goes to the polls.
AJAY SINGH NOT ONLY ENSURED A CONGRESS WIN, BUT ALSO A BIGGER MARGIN OF VICTORY