BHOPAL: Voters in 12 districts of Gwalior-Chambal, Central MP, Bundelkhand and Malwa regions of Madhya Pradesh will vote to elect members for eight Lok Sabha seats on Sunday.
Three of these districts —Vidisha, Guna and Rajgarh —are among the eight districts which were identified as backward districts by the Niti Aayog in 2018. The irony is that these backwards districts have been sending to the Lok Sabha high-profile politicians.
Two assembly segments of Vidisha district form part of the Vidisha Lok Sabha seat, which has been represented twice in the past by sitting BJP MP and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, besides then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee for a few months in 1991 and later for 15 years by Shivraj Singh Chouhan, before he became CM in 2005.
The adjoining Rajgarh Lok Sabha, which is currently represented by BJP’s Rodmal Nagar, however, is seen more as a pocket borough of former CM Digvijaya Singh’s family as Singh and his brother Laxman Singh have represented the seat seven times in the past.
Guna seat since 2002 has been represented by Congress’s Jyotiraditya Scindia, while father Madhavrao Scindia and grandmother Vijaya Raja Scindia had represented the seat before him.
Sagar, apart from Rajgarh and Vidisha, were won by the BJP in 2014 by big margins. However, the party’s margin in two of these three Lok Sabha constituencies —Vidisha and Sagar — shrunk in the Assembly polls six months back while in Rajgarh, the Congress staged a comeback, winning four of the eight Assembly segments.
The three constituencies are crucial to three important leaders. Though Digvijaya or any of his family members are not contesting from Rajgarh, his prestige is at stake as his close associate Mona Sustani is pitted against BJP’s Nagar, who is facing massive anti-incumbency. Digvijaya recently took time out of his Bhopal campaign to seek votes for Sustani.
