Why Madhya Pradesh Congress has zeroed in on Shivraj Chouhan bastion to launch overhaul

The move comes one-and-a-half years after the Congress’s debacle in the 2023 state Assembly elections, when it won just 66 out of 230 seats. The BJP retained power with a decisive majority for another term, securing 163 seats. This was followed by the Congress’s rout in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in the state with the party failing to win any of the 29 seats, all of which were bagged by the BJP, including the Vidisha constituency.

Vidisha is a major political stronghold of the BJP and its stalwart, Union Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who had also won the Budhni Assembly seat from the district for five consecutive times.

In 2024, four-time chief minister Chouhan won the Vidisha Lok Sabha seat by 8.2 lakh votes, one of the highest in the state. His total vote count stood at 11.17 lakh, while Congress candidate Pratap Bhanu Sharma got only 2.95 lakh votes. The seat was once represented in the Lok Sabha by Atal Bihari Vajpayee and later by Sushma Swaraj.

In fact, the BJP has won the Vidisha Lok Sabha seat in all elections, including bypolls, since 1989. Among the Assembly segments that fall within the constituency, the BJP won seven and the Congress just one in the 2023 polls.

The Congress currently organises its cadre in a three-tier structure: sector, mandalam, and booth. The booth-level is the lowest official tier. The concept of the mandalam — an intermediary level — was introduced in 2018 by Congress veteran Kamal Nath when he took charge as the state Congress president before the Assembly polls that year. The latest restructuring under current state Congress president Jitu Patwari adds a fourth layer: committees at the panchayat and urban ward levels.

According to the state Congress, Vidisha district comprises 577 gram panchayats and 139 urban wards spread across six urban local bodies. The proposed committees will be formed at each of these levels. A workforce of 90 trained Congress workers will be deployed in 125 mandalams. In rural areas, one worker will cover two mandalams. In Vidisha town alone, five party mandalam units have been formed.

These workers would identify individuals aligned with the party’s ideology and integrate them into the Congress ecosystem, including its frontal organisations like the Youth Congress, Mahila Congress, Kisan Congress, National Students’ Union of India, and the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe cells.

Congress leaders say that the door-to-door outreach is going to be key to this initiative. “Teams will conduct household surveys to identify supporters and create a ‘Congress Parivar’ database. In addition to political mobilisation, workers will gather biographical data of deceased Congress leaders to observe birth and death anniversaries as part of the outreach,” said a senior party leader.

The Congress hopes to complete the committee formation in Vidisha by June 15. Thereafter, the pilot will be evaluated based on “implementation efficiency, cadre feedback, and electoral readiness”.

This local overhaul is part of a larger revamp that the state Congress began in 2024 under Patwari’s leadership, who replaced Kamal Nath close on the heels of the party’s state poll defeat in December 2023.

In April this year, the Congress issued guidelines on stage discipline, including bell-timed speech durations, standardised stage dimensions, and bans on leaders using vehicles owned by individuals with criminal records. In May, the party asked its MLAs, district presidents, and local in-charges to undergo training in media handling, misinformation detection, artificial intelligence use, and social media conduct.

The Congress’s intent, insiders say, is to combine ground-level structure with institutional discipline — something the party has lacked since its win in the 2018 state polls, which was overturned in 2020 following the defection by a group of MLAs led by Jyotiraditya Scindia, now a Union Minister, that brought down the Kamal Nath-led government.

If Vidisha delivers even modest results in rebuilding cadre strength and public engagement, the Congress may consider extending this model across the state, though the challenges ahead remain steep for the party.

Manoj Kapoor, state Congress secretary who looks after the Vidisha region, said there are around five Assembly seats in the region where the Congress failed to win a single seat. “We are zero and the BJP is at five seats. Bhopal and in general the Madhya Bharat region, which encompasses Vidisha, are all BJP strongholds. We are conducting a pilot project to study how to raise an organisation inside a BJP stronghold. Once we understand that and set up our organisation, then we can in the future take this to other regions,” Kapoor told The Indian Express.

The BJP strongholds also include the Bundelkhand, Vindhya and Malwa Nimar regions, where the Congress has failed to make a dent. Furthermore, the gains the Congress made in 2018 in the tribal seats of Nimar were also reversed in the 2023 elections.

In 2023, senior Congress leader and ex-CM Digvijaya Singh was given the task of touring 66 seats where the party never won in the past three elections, classifying them as BJP bastions. However, it came too late in the day. “It was impossible to raise an organisation in BJP strongholds in a single year. It takes several years to identify a generation of young leaders,” said a Congress leader.