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Journalism of Courage
The BJP bettered its sweep of Madhya Pradesh in 2019 by picking up the sole seat it had lost in 2019, the bastion of former chief minister and veteran Congress leader Kamal Nath. His son Nakul Nath lost from Chhindwara to the BJP’s Bunty Vivek Sahu by a margin of over 1 lakh votes.
After holding a meeting with state Congress president Jitu Patwari, Nath stated that he accepted the “decision of the people”.
Sahu ran the election on the plank of ‘Chhindwara ka Beta’ vs ‘Kamal Nath ka Beta’.
Nath had won nine times from Chhindwara — his family turf — between 1980 and 2019, when Nakul won the seat. The BJP had won 28 of the Lok Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh, losing Chhindwara by 37,536 votes.
On the face of it, the last-minute resignation of the three-time tribal MLA from Amarwara, Kamlesh Shah, and the subsequent dent in the tribal votes, was a major factor behind the loss of Nakul.
However, beneath the surface was a BJP machinery that kept humming even after its landslide victory in the recent Assembly elections when the party ended up with 163 seats in the state. This included effective booth management, feedback teams, nukkad sabhas, personal phone calls from Chief Minister Mohan Yadav, and disseminating the party’s message with the help of women callers helped turn the tide in BJP’s favor.
Reacting to the win, BJP state secretary and state in-charge booth management Rajneesh Agrawal told The Indian Express, “We won Chhindwara because we have been working hard there for decades. Finally our day has come. We won the seat through effective booth management and by setting up supervisory and feedback teams. Also, the central leadership personally intervened and took stock of the monthly targets.”
The beneficiaries of government schemes were the biggest target of the state BJP across the 64,523 booths in Madhya Pradesh. “Each booth level worker was asked to work for 2 hours for 10 days in a single booth. Regular meetings of booth committees and resident workers’ representatives at booth level were also held to discuss strategies, induct new members, maintain contact with the SC,ST and OBC community,” Agarwal said.
As part of the village visits campaign, party leaders said a strategy was made for 4,866 villages deemed weak where “more than 5,300 social meetings of different societies” were held and the senior BJP leaders were in direct touch with “more than 6 lakh people”.
Another arsenal with the BJP was its call centers set up in 21 places at the Lok Sabha level in the state. According to the BJP, “1 crore 64 lakh 85 thousand 560 phone calls were made through the entire system of Lok Sabha dialogue centers.” A total of 2,175 complaints were received which were resolved.
