Former Speaker Charan Das Mahant named new Leader of Opposition in Chhattisgarh

The Congress, which had won the 2018 Assembly elections with 68 seats and upped its tally to 71 in the bypolls in Chhattisgarh, came down to just 35 seats in the recently concluded state polls and the BJP returned to power with 54 of the total 90 seats. The first Assembly session after the elections is likely to begin on December 19 and will conclude in three days.

Nine ministers from the previous Congress government lost their seats in the Assembly elections. Mahant was among the five senior leaders who retained their seats.

Mahant, a second-generation Congress leader, is known for his humility and for being a soft-spoken person. During his tenure as the Assembly Speaker from January 2019 to December 2023, he was praised by both the ruling party as well as Opposition members for being “fair”.

Born in 1954 in the Janjgir-Champa district of Chhattisgarh, Mahant holds a Ph.D. He is a former Union minister and a three-time Lok Sabha member. His father, late Bisahu Das Mahant, was a prominent Congress leader who was one of the longest-serving MLAs and chief of the party unit in undivided Madhya Pradesh.

In 2013, months before the state elections and just after the Jhiram Ghati Maoist attack in which many state Congress leaders were killed, then Congress president Sonia Gandhi asked Mahant to take charge as PCC chief in place of Nand Kumar Patel who died in the attack. Previously, Mahant was the Congress’s state unit chief from 2004 to 2006 and held the additional charge whenever the party needed him.

In 1998, Mahant was asked to contest the Lok Sabha election from Korba seat. He was re-elected in 1999 and 2009. In 2014, he lost his Lok Sabha seat by a narrow margin to the BJP. In 2018, the party fielded him in the Assembly elections from Sakti, where he won by a margin of 20% votes over the BJP candidate. Mahant’s wife Jyotsana contested and won the Korba Lok Sabha seat in 2019 when the Congress could secure only two of the 11 parliamentary seats in the state.

Mahant has also held ministerial portfolios in departments of agriculture, commercial tax, home affairs and public relations in the Madhya Pradesh government.

He was among the three top OBC leaders — others being Bhupesh Baghel and Tamradhwaj Sahu — who were among the front-runners for the CM’s chair in 2018, but sources said he later asked for the Assembly Speaker’s post and got it. On the last day of the Vidhan Sabha, former CM Baghel had complimented Mahant for being “fair and giving more time to BJP MLAs to speak” as the Opposition MLAs were less in number.

Both Mahant and Baghel have been protégés of Digvijaya Singh and served as ministers under the latter in undivided Madhya Pradesh.