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Union Home Minister Amit Shah is set to release the Shivraj Singh Chouhan-led Madhya Pradesh government’s “report card” at an event in Bhopal on Sunday. During the day Shah will also chair and address the state BJP’s working committee meeting in Gwalior, the home turf of Union Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia, the scion of the erstwhile Gwalior royal family.
The MP BJP’s MLAs, MPs, district presidents and general secretaries have been told to reach Gwalior. Around 1,500 office-bearers have been called to the meeting where the party is expected to come out with its final plan for the polls, party insiders said.
This may be the last meeting of the state BJP’s top panel before the Assembly polls slated for the year-end.
The BJP is stepping up its attempts to put up a good show in the Gwalior region in the upcoming Assembly polls, especially after losing the Gwalior mayoral elections to the Congress last year after 57 years.
This will be Shah’s second visit to MP in the last three weeks. On July 30, Shah visited Indore district where he addressed the booth-level party workers.
In the 2018 Assembly polls, the Congress won 26 of the 34 seats in the Gwalior region, when Scindia was with the party and spearheaded its campaign there. After Scindia switched to the BJP along with his loyalists, the Congress could win just 7 of the 19 seats in the bypolls in the region in November 2020. However, the Congress seems to have regained some ground since, with several Scindia loyalists returning to its fold.
On Thursday, the BJP announced its first list of candidates for 39 seats in MP, which included those seats which it lost in the previous polls. The list includes 21 reserved constituencies – 13 Scheduled Tribe (ST) seats and eight Scheduled Caste (SC) seats.
In the November 2018 polls, the Congress had won 114 seats in the 230-member Assembly, while the BJP won 109 seats. The BJP had cited its poor show in the ST seats as one of the reasons for its dismal performance.
While the Congress had formed the government with Kamal Nath as the CM, it was toppled in March 2020 when Scindia led his party faction to defect to the BJP camp.
Currently, the BJP has been reeling from factionalism and infighting, prompting Shah’s direct involvement in its campaign. The party has also been grappling with a “fatigue factor” due to the long stint of four-term CM Chouhan, even as it faces a formidable challenge from the Nath-led Congress in the polls.
In the South, the AIADMK is set to hold its golden jubilee conference in Madurai Sunday, its first major public meeting since multiple courts validated party chief and ex-CM Edappadi K Palaniswami or EPS’s election to its top post months ago.
AIADMK general secretary EPS is expected to use the occasion to demonstrate that he is the party’s undisputed leader following the death of J Jayalalithaa, Arun Janardhanan reports.
The AIADMK leadership expects more than 3.5 lakh people to attend the event, which is being held on the outskirts of the temple city of Madurai. A special train has been arranged to transport party workers from Chennai.
R B Udhayakumar, one of AIADMK’s popular leaders from Madurai, is in charge of mobilising more than 70,000 people from the district alone. Leaders from other districts have been tasked with mobilising 2,000 to 3,000 people each for the rally.
The gathering is being seen as an opportunity to send a strong message, not just to the party’s opponents, but also to its ally BJP, with which it has had a rocky relationship in the past few months.
“After we resolved internal party tensions, AIADMK is finally able to make this statement,” a senior leader in charge of conference preparations said. “This asserts the single leadership of Palaniswami and declares that South Tamil Nadu is ours,” he added.
Despite the tensions between the AIADMK and the BJP, their alliance is likely to continue for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, with both parties leaning on each other for various reasons.
A former AIADMK minister said the Madurai show of strength would send a message to the BJP top brass in New Delhi that they should not induct ousted former AIADMK leaders such as TTV Dhinakaran and O Panneerselvam into the alliance.
Meanwhile, the ruling DMK has called off its planned hunger strike in Madurai Sunday to protest against NEET. Speaking to The Indian Express, a senior DMK leader said the party was suspending the plans in Madurai keeping in mind the AIADMK event.
Back in the North, BJP president J P Nadda will visit Himachal Pradesh, his home state, Sunday to take stock of the havoc wreaked by the recent floods and landslides, which have left at least 77 people dead in the state.
The BJP said Nadda will meet the families of some of those who lost their lives, visit an ancient Shiva temple destroyed by heavy rains and landslides in Shimla. He will hold meetings with the officials in Shimla and Bilaspur to discuss relief and rehabilitation.
Shimla SP Sanjeev Kumar Gandhi had said Friday that the death toll in the rain-battered state stood at 77 and that 23 of these deaths were in the three major landslides in Shimla alone – at the Shiva temple in Summer Hill and in Fagli and Krishnanagar.
The state government has declared the massive damage caused by heavy rains as a state calamity.
Blaming faulty structural design, indiscriminate construction work and “migrant architects” for the destruction faced by his state, HP CM Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, in an interview with The Indian Express, had hinted at tougher building rules in the future. The CM had also said the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) should go for more tunnelling instead of widening the roads, and its engineers need to cut the mountains more scientifically.
Sukhu’s reference to “Bihari architects” prompted a sharp attack from the state Opposition, including the BJP and AAP, on the Congress government.
He sought to distance himself from the remarks. Speaking to The Indian Express Wednesday, the CM had mentioned the term “Bihari architects” a couple of times.
In Haryana, Leader of the Opposition and ex-CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Haryana Pradesh Congress Committee (HPCC) chief Udai Bhan, MP Deepender Singh Hooda and several other leaders, including former MLAs and MPs, will hold a public meeting, “Vipaksh Aapke Samaksh”, in Hisar on Sunday.
These rallies are being held as part of the HPCC’s satewide public outreach in the run-up to the 2024 Assembly polls. In October 2021, Hooda had launched this campaign from Karnal on completion of two years of the BJP-JJP coalition government.
The HPCC has already held such meetings in eight Lok Sabha constituencies so far. The Hisar Lok Sabha constituency is represented by the BJP’s Brijendra Singh.
