Bhopal: Only six months ago, after the Congress formed government in Madhya Pradesh with 114 assembly seats out of 230, it was believed that the Congress’ tally would certainly improve in the Lok Sabha elections. However, the Congress lost two more seats and could win only one seat out of 29. In the last Lok Sabha elections, the BJP was in possession of 27 seats and later in the by-election, the BJP had lost Jhabua seats, increasing Congress tally to three seats.
The party even could not match its own lowest ever performance of 2014 when the party had ended up with two seats –Chhindwara and Guna. This time it is only Chhindwara where the Congress party won losing all the remaining 28 seats, a figure anyone hardly imagined was possible after party’s resurgence in 2018 when BJP’s 15 years of rule was halted.
Besides, Nakul Nath who won in Chhindwara, his father and the Chief Minister Kamal Nath too won in the assembly by-poll in Chhindwara. Almost the entire Congress party was forced to bite the dust in the state.
Among the two, Nath junior who was to win as a cakewalk against a little known Natthan Shah could barely win by a margin of 37,536. Father Kamal Nath too trudged to win with little over 25,000 votes against a local candidate Vivek Sahu.
The dismal outcome however does not augur well for the Kamal Nath government keeping afloat with the support of SP, BSP and four independents.
The defeat of the party seniors –all of them—including Digvijay Singh from Bhopal, Jyotiraditya Scindia from Guna, Arun Yadav from Khandwa, Kantilal Bhuria from Ratlam, Ajay Singh from Sidhi and Meenakshi Natrajan from Mandsaur has shaken up the party organisation completely. The winning margins which went upto five lakh and above also narrated the tale of wrong candidate selection by the Congress party.
With barely 75 days of tenure in the kitty before the election code of conduct came into force on March 10, the Congress government it seems banked heavily on farm loan waiver more than anything else. The government kept reiterating that it has waived off farm loans of 21 lakh farmers till March 10 with limited resources available but the BJP led by former CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan meticulously kept attacking the loan waiver claim.
The loan waiver plank has seemingly failed miserably which was evident from the fact that the Congress was defeated in Mandsaur where the Congress president Rahul Gandhi had announced loan waiver for the first time in June 2018, on the anniversary of police firing on farmers.