The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: Nine leaders from various political parties, including a sitting Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA, on Saturday, September 2, joined the Congress party in Madhya Pradesh ahead of the upcoming elections.
This move took place in the presence of Kamal Nath and the party’s national general secretary in-charge of Madhya Pradesh, Randeep Singh Surjewala.
According to the New Indian Express, out of the nine leaders, three belonged to the core BJP family.
Among them is Bhanwar Singh Shekhwat, who won two assembly polls from Indore-5 and Badnawar (Dhar) in 1993 and 2013, respectively. He lost from Badnawar in 2018 to Jyotiraditya Scindia-loyalist Rajvardhan Singh Dattigaon, who is now a minister in the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government.
Other notable figures included Ashish Agrawal ‘Golu,’ the nephew of a senior BJP leader, and the father-son duo Chedilal Pandey and Shivam Pandey.
Former Congress MLAs Devendra Singh Raghuvanshi’s daughter, Anshu Raguvanshi, and another leader Arvind Dhakad — who had joined the BJP along with Jyotiradhitya Scindia in 2020 — returned to the Congress.
Chandrabhushan Singh Bundela ‘Guddu Raja’, who is the son of Sujan Singh Bundela, two-times former Congress MP from Jhansi, also joined the party.
The newspaper reported that former MLA Shekhawat was upset with the BJP ever since he was denied the ticket to contest Badnawar assembly bypoll in 2020.
He is a very prominent name in the Madhya Pradesh BJP circle with close connections to the Jan Sangh and RSS.
The daily also reported that there are reliable reports that the ruling party is not considering him from any seat of Indore and Dhar districts in the polls, it said.
The upcoming Madhya Pradesh elections are expected to be held in November this year.