Suspense Over Congress, BJP Candidates for MP Bypolls Continues

Bhopal

Hours after pictures of Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s family with Prime Minister Narendra Modi were splashed across newspapers in Bhopal, BJP ticket hopeful from Budhni, Ramakant Bhargava, released pictures of his campaign vehicle to establish the seriousness of his candidacy bid.

Bhargava, a former parliamentarian from Vidisha, had lost his parliamentary ticket to Chouhan after the party decided to field the latter from the constituency in the 2024 General Elections.

Bhargava is now seeking the party ticket from Budhni; only this time, Chouhan’s son, Kartikeya, is the most serious contender from the area, as his name has been proposed by the local party unit.

Budhni is the Chouhans’ home turf; it encompasses the former chief minister’s paternal village, Jait. Through his long stint in Bhopal, Chouhan had ensured that the once impoverished area flourished with roads, irrigation facilities, and commercial activity.

Residents from the area enjoyed free access to the chief minister; his wife, Sadhna Singh, took their sons to Jait during festivals and participated in the celebrations with local women. To give Chouhan his due, he had treated Budhni as his home and area residents as his family.

After the surprise BJP loss to a resurgent Congress under Kamal Nath in 2018, Chouhan had vowed to the people in Budhni that he would return. He kept that promise in under 18 months when the Kamal Nath government collapsed under the weight of defections from the party.

Reading the mood in the BJP after leading the party to a spectacular win in 2023, Chouhan had again gone back to Budhni and told his supporters to be patient, as the ‘Vanvasa’ was a mere interlude before the ‘Rajtilak.’

Chouhan had grown up in the area; people here have seen him undertake walking tours of the region, where he would stop by, talk to locals, and apprise them of the policies of the BJP. The effort had earned him the sobriquet of ‘Paon Paon Bhaiyya.’

Old-timers in the Vidyarthi Parishad remember him as a soft-spoken, poor young man who sometimes had only one pair of clothes and no comfortable shoes. That is the Chouhan that Budhni connects with, as residents in the area see a reflection of themselves in the man and his sensibilities.

It is this commonality that the family enjoys with Budhni that virtually guarantees a record victory for Kartikeya if the party decides to field him in the upcoming November 13 bypoll for the constituency. However, many in the party state unit claim otherwise and maintain that Bhargava remains the most solid candidate in the area.

Bhargava too believes that he has strong chances of being nominated and perhaps issued his campaign posters to keep his followers from getting rattled by pictures of the Chouhans with Modi at his residence earlier this week.

After the visit, the Chouhans said they had met the Prime Minister to invite him for the weddings of their sons—Kartikeya and Kunal—but the pictures had set tongues wagging, as many viewed them as evidence of the young Chouhan’s emergence as the frontrunner in the race for Budhni.

Keeping both Bhargava and Kartikeya on tenterhooks, the BJP is yet to take a call on the two assembly segments scheduled for the bypolls.

The situation is no different in Congress, where the party’s central leadership is reportedly considering several names for candidacy in Budhni and Vijaypur. A top leader in the state Congress has said that the party will bet on young, fresh faces in both areas.

With both the ruling party and the main Opposition keeping their cards close to their chest, no nominations were filed from either of the two constituencies on the first day for filing nominations on Friday.