Cong to suffer for not backing Scindia?

Congress would have faced no “ifs and buts” on its chances of returning to power in Madhya Pradesh in the November 28 assembly elections, had the party declared Jyotiraditya Scindia as its chief ministerial candidate. This view is being expressed not only by a strong section of Congress but also by the ruling BJP leaders.

“In fact, we were a little apprehensive that the Congress would play the Scindia card in the last moment by declaring him a chief ministerial candidate a week before the polls. We were sitting with our fingers crossed even till the eve of polling day hoping that such a development should not take place”, a senior BJP leader confided before this newspaper on Friday.

“Our ground level reading was that the Congress could have effectively created and accentuated the anti- incumbency factor in the run up to polls to harm the prospects of BJP by playing the Scindia card,” the BJP leader, one of the key poll strategists of the party, revealed.

As various exit polls indicated a cliff hanger battle in MP, the decision by the Congress to leave the issue of chief ministerial candidate in ambiguity seemed to have robbed the party of the opportunity to exploit the natural anti- incumbency caused by 15- year- rule of the BJP, political observers said.

The BJP has in fact made Mr Scindia as its “fulcrum” of campaign strategy by identifying him as the key target and accordingly coined a catchy slogan Maf Karo Maharaj, hamara neta Shivraj ( Sorry Maharaj, our leader is Shivraj Singh Chouhan). Mr Scindia, the scion of erstwhile Gwalior royal family, is known as Maharaj among his followers.