BHOPAL: Just six months after pulverizing the Congress 163-66 in the assembly elections, the BJP came out with another splendid performance, sweeping all 29 Lok Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh on Tuesday.
On a day when the BJP suffered major reverses in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan, the neighbouring MP emerged as the brightest spot for the ruling party, which blanked the prime opposition Congress.
The BJP was leading in all 29 seats with massive and comfortable margins.
While all the BJP biggies, including former CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Union ministers Jyotiraditya Scindia, Dr Virendra Khatik, Faggan Singh Kulaste and state party chief VD Sharma were leading by big margins from their respective seats, the Congress biggies have been left stunned by the continuance of the saffron surge.
The biggest story of the saffron success was the crumbling of the lone Congress bastion Chhindwara that was left unconquered by the BJP in the 2019 polls. Lesser-known district BJP president Vivek Sahu ‘Bunty’, who lost the 2023 assembly polls from Chhindwara assembly seat to ex-CM and sitting MLA Kamal Nath, made a stellar comeback leading against Nath’s sitting MP and Congress candidate son Nakul Nath by over 1.09 lakh votes at the time of filling this report.
Right since 1980, Chhindwara has been Kamal Nath’s bastion, which has been won by Nath nine times, once by his wife and once by son Nakul Nath in 2019.
Humbly accepting the imminent defeat, Nath said at the state party HQ in Bhopal, “I respect the verdict of the people of Chhindwara.”
In the Rajgarh seat of central MP, where another septuagenarian Congress veteran and ex-CM Digvijaya Singh was contesting as the Congress candidate from his home seat after 33 years, he was trailing behind second time sitting BJP MP Rodmal Nagar by 90,000-plus votes at the time of filing this report.
With the lead of the BJP candidate (who was faced with high anti-incumbency of ten years) being unassailable, this would be the Congress veteran’s second straight defeat in the Lok Sabha polls, after the 2019 loss from Bhopal seat against Pragya Thakur by over 3.64 lakh votes.
In Ratlam-ST seat, another Congress veteran and ex-Union minister Kantilal Bhuria, who was eyeing a sixth win from the tribal dominated seat of western MP, too was reportedly trailing by over 2 lakh votes against first-time BJP candidate Anita Nagar Singh Chouhan, who is the wife of MP minister Nagar Singh Chouhan.
Among the BJP biggies, the five-time former Lok Sabha member and ex-CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan was leading by a massive 7.76 lakh votes from Vidisha, while Union minister Jyotiraditya Scindia was leading in Guna by around 5.25 lakh plus votes. The state BJP chief and sitting MP VD Sharma was leading by 4.99 lakh-plus votes in Khajuraho, where the INDI bloc was forced to support All India Forward Bloc candidate RB Prajapati, after the official opposition alliance’s candidate SP’s Meera Yadav’s nomination papers were rejected for technical reasons.
But the biggest margin perhaps in the entire country came from India’s cleanest city Indore, where sitting BJP MP Shankar Lalwani was leading by 11.72 lakh votes in a contest where NOTA secured the highest ever 2 lakh plus votes following the opposition Congress’s call of VOTE for NOTA after its candidate withdrew his papers and joined the BJP on April 29.