The Bharatiya Janata Party’s second list of candidates for the Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections due later this year is a power-packed one, with seven sitting Lok Sabha MPs — three of them Union Ministers — and one national general secretary among the 39 named on September 25.
Among the Union Ministers are Narendra Singh Tomar from the Dimani seat of Morena, Prahlad Singh Patel from Narsinghpur and Faggan Singh Kulaste from Niwas have been fielded. Mr. Tomar, who holds the Agriculture portfolio at the Centre, is also the party’s election management committee convener for Madhya Pradesh. Mr. Patel and Mr. Kulaste are both Ministers of State.
In further indication of the party anticipating a tough fight in 2023, the BJP has fielded four of its other MPs — Rakesh Singh from Jabalpur West, Ganesh Singh from Satna, Reeti Pathak from Sidhi and Uday Pratap Singh from Gadarwara. Among them, Ms. Pathak, the current Sidhi MP, has been fielded from the same Sidhi Assembly constituency whose current MLA Kedarnath Shukla drew flak after the Sidhi urination incident in July. Pravesh Shukla, Mr. Kedarnath Shukla’s alleged representative, had urinated on a tribal man Dashmat Rawat causing a massive uproar against the BJP government in the State.
Eight of the 39 names are those who will be contesting for seats in the Gwalior-Chambal region where the fight is said to be the closest among all regions.
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The polls will also see the return of BJP national general secretary and Malwa strongman Kailash Vijayvargiya to electoral politics after a decade, as he has been given ticket from Indore Assembly Number 1 seat.
Apart from them, Vivek Bunty Sahu has been fielded from Chhindwara, a seat currently represented by the Congress’s chief ministerial face Kamal Nath.
Imarti Devi, a loyalist of Union Minister Jyotioraditya Scindia who had crossed over to the BJP from the Congress in 2020 but lost the by-polls that were necessitated, has been fielded from Dabra. The announcement also puts an end to speculations that the former State Minister might not make the cut this time.
Six women
Ms. Devi and Ms. Patak are among the six women who feature in the list. Ten candidates are from the Scheduled Tribes while four are from the Scheduled Castes category.
Some of those named in the party’s second list have family members as sitting MLAs. Narsinghpur from where Union Minister Mr. Patel — the sitting Damoh MP — has been fielded, is currently represented by his younger brother Jalam Singh Patel. Mr. Vijayvargiya’s son Akash Vijayvargiya currently represents Indore 3.
The move comes over a month after the party declared its first list of 39 candidates. Sources had earlier said that the party had prepared the list shortly after the first but delayed the announcement as its Jan Aashrwad Yatras were in progress.
The Karyakarta Mahakumbh in Bhopal, at which Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a massive gathering of party workers hours before the second list announcement, also marked the formal conclusion of the yatras where the party “under collective leadership” travelled across all the 230 Assembly constituencies.
