Dear reader
Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh that sends 29 Lok Sabha members to Parliament, is a foodie’s paradise, with several luscious and unique dishes to offer. One such delicacy is the Bheja Fry at the Afghan Hotel near the Shahid Nagar flyover in Bhopal.
This has no connection with the 2007 Hindi movie Bheja Fry starring Vinay Pathak, Rajat Kapoor, and Milind Soman but is a superb dish whose chief ingredient is lamb or sheep brain, the bheja.
So, what does the dish Bheja Fry have to do with the politics of the State? When you look deeper into the recent mind-boggling political developments in Madhya Pradesh, you will soon realise why the phrase fits.
First, in Bhopal, the BJP denied the ticket to the sitting MP Pragya Singh Thakur, which took many people by surprise because Thakur, known for her controversial hard-core right-wing remarks and her alleged involvement in a blast case, had won the seat in 2019, defeating former Congress Chief Minister Digvijaya Singh by a huge margin.
But the surprises that came later in other seats were even more intriguing.
In the Indore Lok Sabha seat, the Congress candidate, who was strongly supported by the party’s State chief, backed out at the last moment and withdrew his nomination. In Khajuraho, the INDIA bloc candidate filed nomination papers without a signature, which led to the rejection of her candidature. These developments gave two Lok Sabha seats to the BJP without a contest. What could be a better start to BJP’s target of winning 29 seats, after having won 27 Lok Sabha seats in 2014 and 28 in 2019?
The dilemma of the resource-starved Congress is that it has to depend on cash-rich candidates who can fund their own elections. This was a key factor in the selection of the candidate from Indore, Akshay Kanti Bam. Bam is a Hindi word that also means bomb and this one really exploded in the face of the Congress. Hours after withdrawing his nomination, Bam joined the BJP, whose general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya promptly shared a photo of himself with Bam and other BJP leaders.
A visibly upset State Congress chief Jitu Patwari, who is from Indore, said that Bam was intimidated, and pressure tactics were employed by embroiling him in cases. Some commentators wondered why Patwari, who is a two-term Congress MLA from the Rau Assembly seat in Indore and was the runner-up in the 2023 State election, did not think of giving himself a shot at the Lok Sabha seat.
Then, the nomination of the Samajwadi Party candidate Meera Yadav was also rejected in Khajuraho, so the INDIA bloc hurriedly decided to back a candidate of the Forward Bloc, which does not have much of a presence in the region. Ironically, Meera Yadav was not the SP’s first choice, which had earlier announced Manoj Yadav’s name.
Meera, who won the Niwari Assembly seat of Khajuraho in 2008, is the wife of a powerful SP leader from the adjoining Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh, Deep Narayan Yadav. He is a two-term MLA, who was once the chief of the Samajwadi Party in Madhya Pradesh.
Both Khajuraho and Indore are BJP strongholds and the sitting MPs in both places are senior party leaders.
In Gwalior-Chambal, which has always seen a keen contest unlike most other regions of Madhya Pradesh, a State that has turned into a BJP bastion, six-term MLA Ram Niwas Rawat, who was also the Congress candidate from Morena Lok Sabha seat in 2009, joined the BJP on the day Rahul Gandhi was addressing a rally in Chambal. Rawat belongs to the Meena caste, which is OBC in most districts but also a Scheduled Tribe in three districts. Ironically, in the rally, Rahul Gandhi was showing a copy of the Constitution to voters and telling them that the BJP wanted to end reservations by changing the Constitution. The same Rawat had once refused to defect to the BJP with Jyotiraditya Scindia in 2020, when the latter broke off with his band of MLAs.
Scindia has considerable political influence in the Gwalior-Chambal region but to his shock, he lost the 2019 Lok Sabha election against the BJP’s K.P. Yadav, a man who once used to work for Scindia. This time, the Congress has fielded Rao Yadavendra Singh, a Yadav candidate, to take on Scindia. Since K.P. Yadav has been replaced by Scindia, the Congress is trying to cash in on the Yadav anger in the region.
But once bitten twice shy—and the Maharaja or Shrimant, as Scindia is popularly called in the region, is in no mood to lose. Not only has he started door-to-door campaigns, street meetings (nukkad sabhas) and road shows with senior BJP leaders, but his wife Priyadarshini Raje Scindia and son Mahanaryaman Scindia are also carrying out public contact programmes.
Scindia is trying hard to shake off his privilege tag. His videos show him hugging an old woman, his son painting the stairs of a mud hut, and Priyadarshini Raje making rotis with village women and eating paan from a street shop in Shivpuri.
But the fact remains that although Scindia has descended with his entire family from the mahal (the Scindia palace) to the streets, the erstwhile royal family is banking heavily on the double-engine factor of Modi and Maharaja to win the polls.
As for hitting the streets, Digvijaya Singh (77), “Diggy Raja” of the region, is marching around constituencies to win what looks like a tough election as he contests from Rajgarh after a gap of 30 years against a grassroots RSS worker, Rodmal Nagar, for whom the RSS has fanned out its cadre to canvass.
In the ravines of Chambal, where guns once boomed and bandits roamed free, former dacoit Malkhan Singh, who had earlier campaigned for the BJP, joined the Congress in August 2023, campaigning extensively for the party in the 2023 election. As campaigning moves to the Chambal region, Malkhan—whose folktales of Gabbar Singh Gujjar and Pan Singh Tomar inspired Bollywood moves like Sholay and Paan Singh Tomar—could be asked to visit these villages to scout votes for the Congress, especially those of the Parihar clan of Thakurs to which he belongs.
Chambal is seeing two distinct BSP narratives this time—one BSP is Bijli-Sadak-Paani (electricity-road-water) and the other is the Bahujan Samaj Party. In Bhind and Morena, residents talk of bad roads and power cuts, and Mayawati has addressed a rally here and fielded candidates in Bhind, Morena, and Gwalior, making the contest triangular.
When Sandhya Rai of the BJP was elected Lok Sabha MP from this seat in 2019, she was the second woman MP here after Vijaya Raje Scindia of the Bhartiya Jan Sangh in 1971. Guns and goons have always played a key role in Bhind politics, where machoism is a mark of identity and a second win for the BJP’s woman candidate will be an achievement.
Party-hopping is common, but the biggest chunk of hoppers has joined the BJP, and the import is mostly from the Congress. Insiders say that more than 50,000 Congress workers have joined the BJP in Madhya Pradesh but this has created a different kind of problem. Old-timers in the BJP are unhappy with this trend, more so after some of the imports have grabbed tickets. The joke is that there are three BJPs in Madhya Pradesh—the first is Shivraj BJP (supporters of former Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who has mostly confined himself to his Lok Sabha seat of Vidisha), Maharaj BJP (supporters of Jyotiraditya Scindia, who jumped ship with him in 2020), and Naaraaj BJP (angry BJP), the party loyalists hurt with the imports getting prominence.
In this political war of attrition, there are only a few feeble voices raising basic issues impacting the quality of life. As for the Bhopal tragedy of 1984 that killed more than 15,000 people and affected lakhs of people, it finds no mention at all.
Thank you for reading Poll Vault, our election-ready newsletter. Watch this space as campaign season heats up. Until then...
Anand Mishra | Political Editor, Frontline
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