Election Results 2023: Madhya Pradesh involves a big prestige fight between the Congress, BJP.
New Delhi:
The counting of votes for three heartland states and a crucial one in the south — seen as a bellwether ahead of next year’s Lok Sabha polls — has begun. Mizoram votes will be counted Monday after objections about a Sunday counting.
Here are the Top 10 points in this big story:
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Exit polls have predicted that the BJP will retain Madhya Pradesh and reclaim Rajasthan. The Congress is projected to get a second straight term in Chhattisgarh and win Telangana, which would give it a huge surge in the south. Exit polls, though, can often get it wrong.
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Of the four, the contests in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh are generating the most suspense. Telangana also looks promising, given the huge upset predicted by the exit polls — a Congress victory in a state ruled since its inception by K Chandrashekar Rao’s Bharat Rashtra Samithi.
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Rajasthan, despite its habit of swinging between the Congress and the BJP for three decades, threw up a surprise in 2018 by denying either party a majority. The Congress, one short of 101 in the 200-member house, had formed government with support from Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party.
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230-seat Madhya Pradesh involves a big prestige fight between the Congress and the BJP, given the collapse of the Kamal Nath-led Congress government in 2020. The Congress had won the election with a very slim majority and did not survive the defection of Jyotiraditya Scindia to the BJP with 20-plus loyalists.
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A sidebar is the challenge ahead for Mr Scindia, who, though not in the contest, will have to prove his worth to the BJP by exercising control over the 30-plus seats in his home turf, the Gwalior-Chambal belt.
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A BJP victory in Madhya Pradesh could hugely boost the stock of Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the four-time Chief Minister of the state, whom the party did not officially project as its Chief Ministerial candidate. There has been much speculation on whether his political career could grind to a standstill.
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Telangana (119 seats) had kept faith with BRS — which played a key part in the statehood movement – since 2014. But this election was held amid a buzz of anti-incumbency and shock over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim that Mr Rao, after battling for a non-Congress non-BJP government for so long, had asked to be part of the NDA and got turned down.
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The Congress, on an upswing after its huge victory in neighbouring Karnataka, had seized the day, claiming the BRS was hand-in-glove with the BJP. As icing, it pointed out that unlike leaders of Delhi’s ruling Aam Aadmi Party, Mr Rao’s daughter K Kavitha was not questioned – let alone be arrested — by central agencies even though her name cropped up in the Delhi liquor scam.
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Going by the exit polls, 90-seat Chhattisgarh could be the only state where the Congress can perhaps afford to relax. The party is banking on the track record of Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel, who re-built the party in the state after the 2013 Jhiram Ghati Maoist attack.
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For both Congress and the BJP, the results will be crucial ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. Even though the pattern of state and general elections are changing, with the states mostly taking local issues into account for assembly polls, a victory indicates a solid ground machinery and support base that can be counted on for the big test. A Congress victory in Telangana can also lead to its status update in the INDIA bloc, though any change from its current low profile can affect the fragile balance of the alliance.
