Lotus In Limbo

Angry voters, anti-incumbency and a discordant poll campaign bog down the BJP

- Deepak Tiwari

For the BJP’s campaign jugger-naut, Madhya Pradesh is a ma-jor stop on the road to the Lok Sabha elections next year. The state has 29 Lok Sabha seats, which is equal to the number of seats in Telangana, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram put together, and four more than in Rajasthan.

The BJP has always projected Madhya Pradesh, along with Gujarat, as a ‘model state’ in terms of both development and the party’s grassroots reach. And, much like it had been in Gujarat last year, the party is battling a resurgent Congress after having been in power for more than 15 years. Along with Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, two Gujaratis led the BJP’s fight—Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was the party’s general secretary in charge of Madhya Pradesh in 1998, and BJP president Amit Shah.

“The middle class and people living in urban areas are not very happy with the BJP,” said journalist Manoj Sharma. “But there is a big section of the rural poor which thinks that Chouhan has done a lot for them.”

Chouhan is confident of winning a fourth consecutive term. “I have created schemes that serve people [of all ages]—right from the birth of a child to the death of an individual,” he said at an election rally. “Whenever a girl child is born, she gets 1 lakh from the government. Also, there are schemes for free education for the poor, wheat for 1 per kilo, food at subsidised rates, free electricity up to 200 units, and so on.”