BHOPAL: Leaving Congress surprised, ally Samajwadi Party has also named its candidate for the November 13 by-elections to the Budhni assembly seat in central Madhya Pradesh.
The Budhni seat, which has long been considered the citadel of former CM and Union agriculture minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan (who has won a record six times from the seat), is one of the two assembly seats in MP where by-polls will be held on November 13.
While the BJP named Chouhan’s loyalist, former Vidisha MP Ramakant Bhargava, as its candidate on Saturday evening, the Congress declared ex- minister Rajkumar Patel (considered a loyalist of ex-CM Digvijaya Singh) as its candidate.
To the surprise of the prime opposition party, its alliance partner, the Samajwadi Party, has named ex-congress leader Arjun Arya as its candidate from Budhni, making the contest triangular.
Just a few hours before he was declared the SP candidate, the young OBC politician Arjun Arya announced his departure from the Congress party by posting a video on the social media platform X on Sunday.
“Congress doesn’t need leaders; it needs slaves. In MP, all big Congress leaders are hand in glove with the ruling BJP politicians. This has been exposed by the 2023 elections, when the Congress opted for a fake candidate (TV actor Vikram Mastal Sharma) against the sitting BJP MLA and then CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan in the Budhni seat. A 77-year-old politician was fielded by the Congress against Chouhan in the 2024 LS polls from the Vidisha seat, and the results are known to everyone,” Arya said in the video message.
Arya had joined the Congress around five years ago and was among the contenders for a ticket from Budhni in the 2023 assembly polls, but the party then decided to field TV actor Vikram Mastal Sharma from the high-profile seat.
Arya, who was also appointed the Congress’s state secretary, was hopeful of receiving the party’s ticket for the November 13 by-poll, but the party opted for veteran politician Rajkumar Patel, who is considered close to ex-CM Digvijaya Singh.
Patel, who hails from the Kirar caste (the same OBC group to which six-time sitting MLA and union agriculture minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan belongs), won the Budhni seat in 1993, while his brother Dev Kumar Patel won the seat again in 1998, which was the last time the Congress secured a win in Budhni.
Patel’s recent poll performance, however, has been dismal, as in the 2023 polls, he lost by 41,000 votes to sitting BJP MLA Surendra Patwa from the Bhojpur seat in the adjoining Raisen district.
Though the state Congress leadership is still hopeful of convincing the SP to drop out of the race in Budhni, if those efforts do not materialize, then the BJP’s Brahmin candidate may benefit from the possible division of the OBC vote between the Congress and SP candidates in the constituency.
In Budhni, tribal and Dalit voters form the largest chunk of votes, but all OBC castes together constitute the biggest consolidated voting block.
The by-election to the Budhni seat has been necessitated by the election of the sitting MLA Shivraj Singh Chouhan to the Lok Sabha in June from the Vidisha seat.