As BJP candidate, Jyotiraditya looks to regain Guna bastion
“Scindia, oh Scindia dil se; sochna ab kya hai, chunein Modi phir se.” Roughly translated, the lyrics say: “Scindia, from the heart; what’s there to think about, let’s choose Prime Minister Narendra Modi once again.” Union Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia and his supporters dance to the song after he nishes his address at Athai Kheda village in Madhya Pradesh’s Guna Lok Sabha constituency.
More than four years after he made the switch from the Congress, Mr. Scindia is contesting his rst Lok Sabha election as a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate and hopes to reclaim his family’s lost bastion of Guna.
Mr. Scindia’s grandmother Vijayaraje Scindia rst won the Guna seat in 1957 on Congress ticket. She later joined the Bharatiya Jan Sangh and eventually, the BJP. She went on to represent the constituency for ve more terms.
Her son and Mr. Scindia’s father, Madhavrao Scindia, rst won from here in 1971 with the Bharatiya Jan Sangh but later joined the Congress. He also represented Guna for four terms. Mr. Scindia himself was a Congress MP from Guna for four terms.
Though their parties kept changing, and mother and son remained political rivals, the constituency remained in the family since 1989 until the BJP defeated Mr. Scindia in 2019. Fielding a former Scindia family loyalist K.P. Yadav, the BJP leveraged its social engineering and Mr. Modi’s popularity to beat the scion of Gwalior’s erstwhile royal family.
The Guna Lok Sabha constituency, which will vote in the third phase on May 7, consists of eight Assembly seats spread across three districts — Guna, Ashok Nagar, and Shivpuri. The BJP had won six of them in the 2023 Assembly election, with Mr. Scindia running an extensive campaign for the party.
This time, the BJP dropped its sitting MP Mr. K.P. Yadav and elded Mr. Scindia, who had joined the party in March 2020. The Congress, in a replication of the BJP’s 2019 strategy, has elded Rao Yadvendra Singh Yadav, hoping to consolidate the inªuential Yadav community against Mr. Scindia.
Interestingly, Mr. Yadav’s father, Rao Deshraj Singh Yadav, has also unsuccessfully contested the Lok Sabha polls from Guna, once losing to Madhavrao Scindia in 1999 and then again losing to the younger Mr. Scindia in 2002. However, the political aliations of the two families were reversed back then.
Riding on the back of the BJP and Mr. Modi’s popularity, the Scindia family does not want to leave anything to chance this time.
Mr. Scindia makes a slew of promises, from ensuring a network of rail lines and roads to bringing Kendriya Vidyalayas to the region to speaking with State Chief Minister Mohan Yadav to get compensation for farmers whose crops were damaged in the recent hailstorms.
While keeping the local issues and his family’s personal connect at the centre of his outreach, a signicant part of Mr. Scindia’s speeches also focus on the Modi-led Union government’s ªagship schemes for free ration and rural housing, as well as the BJP’s core issues such as the Ayodhya Ram Temple and nationalism.
Mr. Scindia’s son, speaking with The Hindu after addressing anukkad sabha in Shivpuri district’s Badera village, di¢erentiates between the BJP and Congress strategies, saying that a BJP candidate has the full strength of its cadre behind him.
The campaigning from both sides is at its peak, and apart from the Scindia family’s hold on the region, caste equations also play a key role in Guna.
Having turned into a prestige battle for the erstwhile royal family of Gwalior, the Guna contest will also decide Mr. Scindia’s political stature in the BJP and who will hold sway over the crucial GwaliorChambal region of the State.