A SEMI WIN IN A SEMI FINAL

MADHYA PRADESH

- Rahul Noronha

The media and party leaders dubbed it the 'semi-finals' before the 2023 assembly poll in Madhya Pradesh, and the results of elections to 413 municipal bodies-held after a delay of two and a half years-justified the pre-bout hype. Presidents of the 99 municipalities and 298 nagar parishads will be elected later by councillors through indirect elections, but even if just the direct elections held for choosing mayors of 16 municipal corporations were to be considered, the results held enough scope for endless analysis and introspection, for both the BJP and the Congress.

All 16 mayoral contests had been won by the BJP in 2015. This time, the saffron party managed to retain only nine, and the Congress took its tally from zero to 5. The BJP's defeat in Gwalior, Morena and Jabalpur was especially embarrassing. The Congress has won Gwalior after a gap of 57 years, and that it comes after the exit of the local big gun-Union minister Jyotiraditya Scindia-must gladden it. Narendra Singh Tomar, another Union minister, also hails from Gwalior region, as do other BJP biggies. The Congress also won Chhindwara, PCC president Kamal Nath's home turf, after a long time, and Rewa, headquarters of the Vindhya region where the Congress had been decimated in the 2018 assembly election. The grand old party nearly won Burhanpur and Ujjain too, losing to the BJP by less than 1,000 votes.