After Assembly poll defeat, Baghel looks for redemption
This is the third Lok Sabha election that senior Congress leader and former Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel is ghting. The previous two attempts ended in failure. Once again he is back on the trail, this time from Rajnandgaon, to redeem his name after the loss in the 2023 Assembly election.
In the four Lok Sabha elections that Chhattisgarh has seen, the Congress’s best performance was in 2019, winning two out of the 11 seats here. The Rajnandgaon constituency has been a bastion of the BJP for three straight terms since 2009. Mr. Baghel, like many other senior party leaders, was reluctant to contest from here, arguing that he would be pinned down to one constituency, but eventually gave in to pressure from the party’s central leadership.
The Hindu met Mr. Baghel at his home in Bhilai on Friday. There was no fanfare to be seen, just a clutch of visitors hanging around to get his ear. Mr. Baghel’s destination for the day is nearly 100 km away — the tribal hamlets of Mohla-Manpur-Ambagarh Chowki district.
2023 defeat
The defeat in the Assembly election was entirely unexpected, Mr. Baghel says. “EVM is a big reason for our defeat,” he says. But he also accepts that anger against its legislators tripped the Congress.
“There was a larger narrative that the Congress is anyway returning to power, so the voters voted out the incumbent MLAs, whom they were dissatis
ed with,” he says, pushing the blame to the non-performance of his MLAs for the Congress’s defeat.
The Congress secured 35 seats in the 90-member Assembly, a steep fall from the 68 it had won in 2019.
Mr. Baghel’s rst stop is Pagri village. On a green plastic mat, women sit in rapt attention. The men are standing at the margins. There is no loud music, no drums, not even much sloganeering. Mr. Baghel addresses the women directly in Chhattisgarhi. He lists out the welfare schemes run by his government that the BJP had stalled, he claims, including the distribution of 35 kg of rice to every household. In tribal areas, additionally, chana (a lentil), gur (jaggery) and salt was distributed, he says.
The BJP government claims that the allocation has not been reduced, the scheme has only been tweaked by changing the distribution unit from household to person.
The shadow of investigations into his role in the Mahadev betting app case hangs over him this election. So, instead of going big, it is a well thought out strategy, according to his aides, to address smaller meetings, reaching out to voters on a more personal basis. “In a single day, I address such gatherings in 20-30 villages. Hopefully, by the end of the campaign, I would have addressed 800-900 villages,” Mr. Baghel says.
On Sunday, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is addressing two rallies in his constituency to make up for any remaining gaps.
In his speeches, Mr. Baghel dwells on a mix of topics — the record of his
ve years in government, welfare schemes promised by the Congress, and a scathing attack on his allegedly “missing” opponent, the BJP’s incumbent MP, Santosh Pandey.
The Congress is hoping that Mr. Baghel will be able to pull through on the back of anti-incumbency against the Modi government, and the unpopularity of the sitting MP.