Former chief minister Kamal Nath’s discredited political legacy loomed large in the Lok Sabha election resulting in the crushing defeat of the Congress in all 29 seats in Madhya Pradesh including his Chhindwara bastion.
Trail of destruction
In this election, the former Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) president remained bound in his pocket borough to desperately save it for his son Nakul Nath, but the trail of Congress devastation he left in the assembly election last year across Madhya Pradesh has persisted.
Kamal Nath’s successor Jitu Patwari in his three months as PCC chief proved miserably unequal to the task of reviving the moribund party. He sorely lacks the stature to command the respect of the party men and the humility to win the trust of the senior leaders. His incompetence on both counts was glaringly evident in the way he utterly failed to pre-empt the BJP’s shenanigans in getting the INDIA (Samajwadi Party) candidate’s nomination form rejected in Khajuraho and the last-minute withdrawal of the Congress candidate in Indore.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
The Indore candidate Akshay Kanti Bam was strongly recommended by Jitu Patwari to the Congress high command despite strong protest from the local party leaders. Shocked by Bam’s treachery, Patwari requested the Indore voters to press the NOTA button. Record 2.8 lakh voters responded to the Congress appeal but that did not prevent BJP candidate Shankar Lalwani from scoring victory by the highest margin in the country at 11.75 lakh votes.
Now that the Congress has drawn a blank in Madhya Pradesh, the PCC chief has owned responsibility for the disappointing outcome.
Unequal battle for start
Admittedly, it was an unequal battle between the BJP and the Congress from the start. Virtually, insurmountable odds were stacked against the opposition. In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the BJP had won 28 seats with a total vote share of nearly 60% against the Congress’s 35%. In terms of resources and aggressive campaign, the BJP was miles ahead of the opponent.
Bitter memories of the stunning loss in the assembly election were still fresh in the minds of the demoralised Congress. And to add to its woes, the BJP engineered mass-scale defection from the Congress rank at all levels across the state. Instead of stemming the mass exodus, a demoralised Congress leadership helplessly watched its organisation getting attenuated. Three sitting Congress MLAs left the party in the midst of the polling that began on April 19.
Mistrust in leadership
As a result, deepening mistrust in the leadership percolated down the grassroots workers. The workers were already dejected by the assembly election debacle and the rumours of Kamal Nath defecting to the BJP further lowered his morale.
Kamal Nath. Credit: Facebook/Kamal Nath
Although Kamal Nath went all out to scotch the rumours and swore by the Congress ideology, neither the ordinary Congress worker in the state nor the voters of his son’s Chhindwara constituency were convinced. Nakul Nath’s defeat by a margin of 1,33,000 votes is an ample reflection of the all-pervasive suspicion about the former chief minister’s loyalty to the Congress. His emotional appeal and repeated reminders to the people about the development work he claimed to have carried out in the last four decades in Chhindawara apparently cut no ice with the voters.
Hopes dashed
If the lone Congress citadel crumbled due to Kamal Nath’s rumoured hobnobbing with the BJP, the other 28 seats steadfastly remained loyal to the party. The Congress was hoping to give a good fight in at least a dozen constituencies but the heavy burden of its dismal record dashed the hopes.
All these seats had been traditionally won by the BJP by huge margins in the 2019 election and this time round the party’s well-oiled machinery ensured that the margins got bigger. And it surely did – by 1.2%. Out of 29 BJP candidates, 25 won by the margins of over one lakh votes. Former chief minister Shivraj Singh reclaimed his old Vidisha seat by a margin of over 8 lakh votes. Jyotiraditya Scindia, who had lost as Congress candidate in Guna by nearly 1.5 lakh votes, wrested the seat with 5.40 lakh votes.
Individual efforts failed
However, to be fair to the Congress, its candidates fought valiantly in at least half a dozen seats. The organisation may not have been adequately helpful to them but their individual efforts coupled with an optimistic caste combination raised hopes of bucking the trend, but they capitulated before the BJP’s vast resources and superior campaigning.
Digvijay Singh’s defeat
For instance, Digvijay Singh spared no efforts to win the Rajgarh seat, which he had won in 1991 last time, but his otherwise seemingly weak opponent Rodmal Nagar got the better of the Congress veteran, largely on the strength of RSS volunteers in this saffronised constituencies.
Even in the tribal seats such as Mandla, Jhabua-Ratlam and Dhar, where the Congress had put up strong enough candidates to turn the tide, the BJP scored a handsome victory. Gwalior, Satna, Bhind and Morena were the other four seats where the contests looked neck and neck but Congress bit the dust. In other constituencies, the buzz was confined to the victory margins of the BJP candidates. These are no-hopers for the Congress since 1989.
Disastrous dalliance with Hindutva
So, why is the Congress stuck in the abyss of gloom and doom for such a long time in Madhya Pradesh?
The answer is that it has been egregiously seeking to play on the BJP’s pitch of Hindutva with utter disregard for its stated ideology of secularism. Of course, this time round the Congress campaign followed the secular narrative propagated by the central leadership but that proved too little, too late to wash off its strategic blunders of the past. Here again, Kamal Nath must be blamed for abandoning secularism for the lure of Hindutva to outdo the BJP.
Self-styled Hanuman Bhakt went all out to make the Congress appear as a carbon copy of the BJP in the assembly election. The people comprehensively rejected his devious ploys as they had the option to elect the original proponent of Hindutva. His discredited attempts harmed the Congress’s efforts to carve out a distinct identity vis-s-vis the BJP.
Herculean task ahead
The Congress has a herculean task before it to overcome the BJP’s formidable challenge. The saffron party has managed to subsume caste identity politics under its vast Hindutva canopy. Sensing the political dynamics about castes, the BJP fielded 16 candidates from the Other Backward Castes OBCs. What is more, the party has OBC leadership in the shape of former chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and his successor and incumbent Mohan Yadav. The Congress, on the other hand, has no such credible OBC leader at the top level.
Basking in the unprecedented glory of the clean sweep, chief minister Mohan Yadav is likely to stay on till the next assembly election in 2028. Also, Shivraj Singh Chouhan is a very strong contender for cabinet minister rank in the Modi government.
The combined political clout of these two OBC leaders will remain a big challenge for the Congress. Unless the party stays on the course of secularism and pushes up new leadership from among the OBCs, SCs and STs, the coming elections, too, have only disasters in store.
The era of Kamal Nath–Digvijay Singh duo is gone. But their replacements such as PCC chief Jitu Patwari and leader of opposition Umang Singhar don’t look promising enough. Therefore, it is a long haul for Rahul Gandhi and his team to pick and nurture a young generation of leaders in Madhya Pradesh. The crushing defeat in the Lok Sabha election could be a useful lesson why not to repeat the self-destructing blunders of the past.
