‘Nath’s citadel Chhindwara will fall this time in the 2024 polls’.
NEW DELHI: Of the 18 Lok Sabha elections that Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh has witnessed since 1951, when the first elections were held in the country, except in the 1997 bypolls, the Congress candidate has never lost from there.
Even in the “Modi wave” of 2014 and 2019, the Chhindwara seat, which has been with former CM and Union minister Kamal Nath and his family members since 1980, the BJP candidate could not win. However, what has increased the hope of BJP of breaking this decades-old trend in this high-profile seat in the 2024 polls, scheduled for May 2024, is the fact that when Kamal Nath had contested the election in 2014, the winning margin was 1,16,000 votes. This was in line with the trend that the seat has seen since 1998 polls; of sending Kamal Nath to Lok Sabha with a winning margin of more than 1 lakh votes. In the 2019 polls, despite Chhindwara being the only Lok Sabha seat that the Congress was able to save in the state, the winning margin for Kamal Nath’s son, Nakul Nath, who contested the seat in place of his father, got reduced to 38,000 votes.
As per Madhya Pradesh-based BJP leaders, Kamal Nath’s citadel of Chhindwara will fall this time in the 2024 polls. The BJP central leadership, party sources said, is itself monitoring its preparation on this seat. This seat has been included in the 160 seats that are a part of the “Lok Sabha Pravas Yojana”, a grand plan of the party devised in May 2022 in which the party decided to depute a senior leader or a Union minister in seats where the party lost narrowly in 2019 polls. In these seats, Prime Minister Modi will do at least 40 rallies, while the rest 120 will see the rallies of party president Jagat Prakash Nadda and Home minister Amit Shah.
In 2022, Union minister from Bihar, Giriraj Singh, was appointed as the in-charge for this seat. Saturday’s rally of Home Minister Shah in Chhindwara, too, is a part of this plan and as per party sources, it ranks among the seats where the BJP has among the “best” chance to win. Of the seven Assembly seats that are a part of the Chhindwara Lok Sabha seat, three are reserved for Scheduled Tribes candidates. As of now, all the seven seats are with Congress.
Speaking to The Sunday Guardian, Nathan Singh Kawreti, the BJP candidate who lost the 2019 polls, said that this time, it was “inevitable” that the BJP will win from Chhindwara. “In 2019, I was given 16 days to prepare for the elections. And due to the support of the party workers and senior leaders, we came very close to winning. Conversely, by the time the election came, Kamal Nath had covered all the seats and main points of the seat through helicopter. At that time, the Congress was in power in the state and this also helped Nakul Nath. However, this time, the Congress candidate will not win. The popularity of the Nath family has decreased significantly in the region and Nakul Nath does not like to go among the voters. The BJP, irrespective of who its candidates will be, will win from Chhindwara this time,” he said.
According to one of the members of team Rahul Gandhi, it was “true” that Nakul Nath was yet to develop the patience and wisdom to meet the hundreds of people who came to meet him. “He is still learning how to become accessible, but there is no doubt that he has worked a lot for the constituency as a MP and there is no reason why a Congress candidate, irrespective of who it will be, will not win from Chhindwara,” the leader said.
A political observer based in Chhindwara said that due to the work carried out in Chhindwara by Kamal Nath, much of which he has managed by pulling strings and favours through his personal contacts, he is very popular in the region. “Chhindwara is not run from Bhopal and it is, by his supporters, described as a state within state. The ‘Chhindwara model’ is much talked about here. However, his son Nakul is yet to learn a lot and the voters’ love for Kamal Nath may not necessarily transfer to his son, as 2019 showed. The battle for Chhindwara for the 2024 polls, for me, is still wide open,” he said.
The “Chhindwara model”, which was also a talking point during the last month Congress plenary in February, refers to the various startups, small and medium manufacturing enterprises, local call centers that have come up in the last decade that provide employment opportunities to the local population. Politically, it also refers to the way Kamal Nath, through his staff, handles the complaints and grievances of his voters who reach out to him through the Congress office. Every such grievance, irrespective of whether it’s of personal nature or related to administration, is handled in a well-defined systematic manner by his staff. Another aspect of this model is Kamal Nath ensuring that his voters who come to Delhi, especially from the economically weaker section, are given accommodation at his house in Delhi and even their train tickets are arranged by the office of Kamal Nath.