Fortified Bypolls With Irony Pills

The campaign for bypolls in 28 assembly segments of Madhya Pradesh is proving to be a heady cocktail of ironies. The result on November 10 will determine whether chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan stays in office or not. But it is BJP’s Rajya Sabha MP Jyotiraditya Scindia who has been telling voters that his honour rests on the bypolls. The Congress’s campaign highlights the betrayal by 25 of its legislators who are now seeking re-election as BJP candidates. But it showcases with pride half-a-dozen candidates who, until recently, were with the BJP.

While 16 of the 28 constituencies are in the state’s Gwalior-Chambal belt, Digvijaya Singh, the Congress’s lone mass leader from this region since Scindia’s defection to the BJP, is keeping a safe social distance from the campaign; leaving old friend Kamal Nath to plough the unfamiliar electoral terrain. Scindia, the titular ruler of Gwalior, is now being derided by the Congress as a treacherous feudal lord. His new colleagues in the saffron parivar insist that he is a member of the proletariat, but then the royal has been telling his ‘subjects’ that they must “avenge their Maharaja”.

It really is difficult to make sense of the political theatre playing out in MP. What is, however, abundantly clear is that these are no ordinary bypolls. The 28 seats that go to the polls on November 3 hold the key to power for the state, which saw a BJP coup in March—just 15 months after the Congress broke a 15-year electoral drought. An architect of the coup was Scindia, whose personal defeat at the hands of the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections did not deter him from toppling the Congress government he was instrumental in installing. Yet, the starkest of ironies in these bypolls revolves around the Gwalior royal.

The fact that the BJP could return to power in the state only because Scindia delivered the party a block of 22 Congress legislators has understandably made him the centre of the campaign. Despite reservations of several BJP veterans from the state who saw the sudden influx of Congress MLAs as a threat to their political relevance, Scindia ensured that all 25 MLAs who quit the Congress, including those who did not belong to his ‘camp’, were fielded by the BJP. Scindia had also succeeded in getting 14 of his nominees inducted in Chouhan’s 33-member council of ministers. However, the niceties extended to Scindia have their limits.

On election posters and campaign vehicles of the party, Scindia’s photograph is missing. His name appears at the 10th position on a list of 30 BJP star campaigners. “People have to earn respect in the BJP, they will not be placed on a pedestal only because of their surname or title,” says party veteran Jaibhan Singh Pawaiya, a bitter Scindia rival. Pawaiya, whose rivalry with Jyotiraditya or even the late Madhavrao Scindia is well-known, has been vocal about his reservations on how the BJP is “relying too heavily on turncoats instead of loyalists”. Also, several party stalwarts from the Gwalior-Chambal region privately express their inability to accept Scindia and his loyalists.

A BJP veteran who lost the last assembly polls to a Scindia loyalist and was denied a ticket in the bypolls because “dalbadlu (turncoat) had to be fielded”, says once the party announced a candidate in past elections, “every karyakarta worked to ensure victory but now we have been forced to make a distinction between BJP’s candidates and Scindia’s candidates because the latter don’t identify themselves with the party but only with Maharaj.” This, he says, has also upset the BJP cadre and the party could end up paying a “heavy price”.

For Scindia, the campaign has presented some harsh realities that he was hitherto isolated from. During his stint in the Congress, his colleagues had no qualms in publicly hailing him as Maharaj or Shrimant. The BJP, including Chouhan, taunted him for his feudal lineage and the previous assembly polls saw the party launching a campaign with the tagline ‘bas karo Maharaj’ mocking Scindia. Now, Chouhan is telling people that “Shivraj and Maharaj are one”, while the Congress is busy claiming the Scindias “have been power-hungry traitors since the time of Rani Jhansi”. At public rallies, Scindia has had embarrassing encounters with angry voters who see his move to the BJP as a “betrayal of their trust”; at one such rally a voter interrupted his speech to tell Maharaj that “you neither became our shield nor our sword”.

BJP sources say they have “no option but to rely on Scindia for now”. “We owe our government’s formation to Scindia, but we are also aware of the resentment among our cadre due to the importance being given to his loyalists. In the bypolls, Scindia now has to prove his usefulness to the party. If several of his candidates lose, the party’s attitude will change, but we can’t afford to alienate him right now,” says a senior state BJP functionary.

The Congress spares no opportunity to humiliate its former frontline leader. It regularly releases memes on social media mocking Scindia, who had quit the Congress claiming that the Nath government failed to deliver its promise to write off loans of MP’s farmers. The Chouhan government informed the state assembly this September that loans of 26.95 lakh farmers, collectively amounting to Rs 11,600 crore, were waived by the Congress government. Nath has now been touring poll-bound constituencies reiterating the BJP government’s statement and seeking an apology from Scindia and Chouhan for “lying to the people”.

The Congress has released a “bypoll manifesto”—the focus remains the farmers and a slew of promises have been made anew for the Gwalior-Chambal region. “The bypoll manifesto is crucial because the result of these elections will decide who holds power in the state. Most of what we have promised, including development projects for Gwalior-Chambal, was part of our 2018 manifesto. But Scindia conspired with the BJP to bring down our government before we could fulfill the promises,” says Sajjan Singh Verma, former minister and Nath’s confidante.

The Congress knows that returning to power in the state after the bypolls will be difficult because it needs to win every seat on offer to cross the simple majority mark of 116. For its part, the BJP needs to win nine seats. Congress sources say the real goal is to ensure the BJP doesn’t make a clean sweep and that “at least half of Scindia’s loyalists lose”. Nath believes that if the Congress manages to win around 18 of the 28 seats, he will have the support of seven legislators—including those of the BSP and SP—to form a new government.

A limited setback for the BJP in the bypolls, even if it doesn’t oust the party from power, may have the potential to trigger a referendum against Scindia by old party warhorses. A substantial chunk of state BJP leaders and certainly everyone in the MP Congress seems to be hoping for such an eventuality—a rare bipartisan unity of thought. Will Gwalior-Chambal really be the Maharaj’s Waterloo?