With Congress in disarray, BJP in driving seat in MP Phase 2 strongholds, eyes walkover in Khajuraho

In the seven Lok Sabha seats up for voting on Friday, the Congress has not been able to make its presence felt for over 15 years. The party is now hoping that it would be able to leverage the “anti-incumbency” against the BJP MPs in these constituencies. The BJP has retained its candidates in these seats barring Damoh and Hoshangabad.

However, a lack of organisation on the ground and an exodus of party leaders from these regions have added to the woes of the Congress, which remains adrift in the state. In the Assembly elections too, the Congress had failed to make a mark in these belts.

Madhya Pradesh CM Mohan Yadav in Khargone. (File Photo)

In the Khajuraho seat in the Bundelkhand region, state BJP president V D Sharma is in the fray, who has virtually got a walkover after the Samajwadi Party (SP)’s candidate Meera Yadav’s nomination form was rejected by the returning officer for reportedly not having her signatures at some designated places. The Congress had left the seat for its INDIA bloc ally SP as part of their seat-sharing agreement.

Stung by the development, SP national president Akhilesh Yadav and MP Congress chief Jitu Patwari had cried foul, calling it a “murder of democracy”. Subsequently, the Congress announced that the All India Forward Bloc (AIFB) nominee and ex-IAS officer R B Prajapati will be the INDIA alliance’s joint candidate in Khajuraho.

The Sharma camp is confident of a resounding win. In his campaign, the state BJP chief is promising that he would turn the parched Bundelkhand into a green region, claiming that the long-pending Ken-Betwa river linking project would finally take off now. In the 2019 polls, he had defeated the Congress’s Kavita Singh by about 4.92 lakh votes.

In the neighbouring Tikamgarh, a Scheduled Castes (SC)-reserved seat, the contest is between the incumbent BJP MP and Union social justice minister Virendra Kumar Khatik and the Congress’s Pankaj Ahirwar, a political newcomer and vice-president of the state Congress’s SC wing. Ahirwar has been projecting the contest as a “local vs outsider” fight as Khatik, a seven-time MP, originally hails from Sagar, which he also initially represented for a few times. In 2019, Khatik had trounced the Congress’s Kiran Ahirwar by 3.48 lakh votes.

The BJP has been winning the Damoh constituency in north-east MP since 1989. Former Union minister Prahlad Patel had won from Damoh in 2014 and 2019. But he quit as an MP after winning in the Assembly polls from Narsinghpur and is now a minister in the Mohan Yadav-led BJP government in the state.

This time, the Damoh seat is witnessing a Lodhi vs Lodhi fight, with the BJP’s Rahul Lodhi, who defected from the Congress, taking on the Congress’s Tarvar Singh Lodhi. Both had been MLAs once.

In the Satna Lok Sabha constituency in the Vindhya region, the BJP’s four-time MP Ganesh Singh is pitted against the Congress’s Siddharth Kushwaha, who defeated him in the Assembly polls with a narrow margin from the Satna segment. In an interesting move however, the BJP has retained him in this election.

Both Ganesh and Siddharth are OBC leaders. Their contest has however become more interesting now, with former BJP leader Narayan Tripathi fighting on the BSP ticket, making the battle a triangular affair. Tripathi may wean away from the BJP a section of its Brahmin voters, who account for 22% of the electorate here. However, the BJP is hoping that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s guarantees and the Ram Mandir factor would help it romp home.

Madhya Pradesh will have a four-phase polls for its 29 seats. In the first phase on April 19, six constituencies, including Chhindwara, had gone to polls. The BJP had bagged 28 seats in the 2019 polls, when the Congress had managed to get just Chhindwara, Kamal Nath’s stronghold.