Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur is unlikely to be repeated. Digvijaya Singh will not contest from the seat.
The high profile Bhopal Lok Sabha seat., which had sent Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur to Parliament in 2019, will witness a battle between two new candidates this time.
While the BJP is unlikely to repeat Pragya, former Chief Minister Digvijaya Singh, who had contested as the Congress candidate the last time, has announced that he won’t contest from Bhopal.
In place of Thakur, the BJP is likely to field a new face, as has been its trend in the last few elections.
The Congress, meanwhile, bereft of too many strong contenders who can at least present a semblance of a fight on this seat, is likely to go with Sanjeev Saxena, general secretary, Madhya Pradesh Congress, who runs a network of pharmacy and engineering colleges in the state and has been contesting Assembly elections since the latter part of 2000.
The last time a Congress candidate won from the Bhopal Lok Sabha seat was in the 1984 elections and since then the seat has witnessed nine elections, all of which have been won by candidates with the Lotus symbol.
In 2014, the BJP had fielded a relatively unknown face and party leader Alok Sanjar, who was then replaced in 2019 by Pragya Thakur. Despite the Congress asking its stalwart Digvijaya Singh to fight from Bhopal in 2019, the BJP won by a margin of 3.65 lakh votes, even after Singh managed to secure more than 5 lakh votes, the highest by any Congress candidate in the history of Lok Sabha elections in Bhopal.
This increased vote share of Singh was attributed to his tall political stature and the anger within the BJP party cadre and state leader against the BJP leadership for giving the ticket to Thakur. The then party president Amith Shah had to personally go to Bhopal and ensure that the top state leaders come together and help Thakur. However, Thakur, failed to live up to the party’s expectations and has become unpopular both with the cadre and the electorate.
According to BJP leaders based in Bhopal, a few under consideration for the seat included former Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Alok Sharma, vice president of the state BJP and ex mayor of Bhopal who has been unsuccessfully trying for a Lok Sabha debut since 2014 elections. Sharma is regarded as a protégé of Chouhan.
According to party sources, a section within the party feels that it would be unwise to ask Chouhan to contest from the guaranteed seat of Bhopal. Given his state-wide popularity, he should rather be fielded from the Congress bastion of Chhindwara, which the BJP has never won since Independence, except for a byelection in 1997, a record which remained unbroken even during the “Modi waves” of 2014 and 2019.
Another thinking in the party is to field a relatively unknown face from Bhopal who should be selected from the thousands of party workers who have worked on the ground without any top post.
Digvijaya Singh, who is a Rajya Sabha member, might contest from the Rajgarh Lok Sabha seat as the Congress high command, following the example set by the BJP in last year’s Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections, is likely to ask its top leaders to fight direct elections. Singh had successfully contested from the seat in 1984 and 1991. At present it is held by BJP’s Rodmal Nagar, who is likely to be denied a ticket this time.