Congress wins Chitrakoot by election: Are winds of change blowing across MP?

The cyber warriors of the Bhartiya Janta Party in Madhya Pradesh went into overdrive as results of the by elections to the Chitrakoot Vidhan Sabha started trickling in on Sunday.

Through a message that was widely circulated on WhatsApp and other social media platforms, they claimed that BJP candidate Shankar Dayal Tripathi who lost to Neelanshu Chaturvedi of the Congress by over 14,000 votes was never the first choice of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan.

The cyber warriors pulled out past election results and said the BJP had won the seat only once, that too with a very thin margin. So it was no big deal for the Congress to win the seat that traditionally belonged to the grand old party.

“Also the Congress should not read too much into the results as the state assembly elections were still a year away and Chitrakoot by no stretch of imagination can reflect the mood of state,” they warned.

However, notably, Shivraj Singh Chouhan made seven visits to Chitrakoot in the run up to the elections and addressed more than 60 big and small rallies. Twice he stayed overnight in Chitrakoot, first time at the forest guest house in Sarbanhga, where he played a common man by publicising the Rs 200 that he gave as room rent and the second time he stayed at the house of a Gond Tribal Banke Bihari where a separate toilet was built for him. The toilet was later dismantled and the seat taken away by BJP workers. Chouhan also made 79 promises that included construction of an ITI and a dam on the Payawami river.

But the question arises that why would CM Chouhan put his name at stake for a candidate who was not of his choice?

It seems Chouhan and the BJP tried every trick in the bag to win Chitrakoot. BJP state president Nand Kumar Chouhan even went to the house of  Mangal Singh, the nephew of the late Prem Singh of the Congress whose death necessitated the by election and presented him with a BJP flag and claimed before the media that he had joined the BJP.

Mangal Singh the next day addressed a press conference alongside Ajay Singh of the Congress and announced that he had nothing to do with the BJP and that he accepted the flag because Nand Kumar Chouhan had come at his door. Besides this, over one dozen ministers of the Shivraj cabinet campaigned at Chitrakoot. Also, the BJP flew in Uttar Pradesh deputy chief minister Keshaw Prasad Maurya who asked for votes from his community members. In the end, the election results showed all this was not enough.

The Congress on the other hand allowed Ajay Singh, the leader of opposition in the state Vidhan Sabha to lead the campaign. His focus was the promises that Chouhan had made in the past and the impact of demonetisation and GST on the common man.

The BJP leadership in MP may not openly accept it but after the results even die hard BJP fans are also silently acknowledging the winds of change that appear to be blowing across the state.

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