Sudhir K Singh

A "civilisational" contest to boot is what it may well turn out to be given the larger issues at stake. In no other single contest are the battle lines as clearly drawn as in Bhopal: National interest versus minority appeasement.

The Congress’s best performance was in 2009 when its nominee, a non-Muslim, lost by the lowest ever margin of around 65,000 votes. Otherwise, the BJP has consistently polled 50-60% of the popular vote, with its winning margin ranging from a low of a lakh to over 3.5 lakh in 2014. This is the seat Digvijaya Singh, with the baggage of an anti-Hindu image, is fighting for.

In Madhya Pradesh, the hard reality is that not more than six or seven of the ministers have any worthwhile experience. Predictably enough, most of the plum portfolios have gone to chief minister Kamal Nath's own supporters and that of Digvijaya Singh who has emerged as the backbone of the government

The Ganga may be the most celebrated and longest of the seven sacred rivers, but the Narmada at No 5 is the holiest as well as the oldest. There is enough evidence, both scriptural and scientific, to suggest it. The Matysa Purana clearly says the Ganga is sacred at Kankhala (Hardwar), the Saraswati at Kurukshetra, but the Narmada is sacred all along its banks, be it forest or places inhabited

Though Kamal Nath's importance in the party continued to grow in the eighties and nineties, he never extended his ambitions beyond Chhindwara even as Delhi remained his actual work base both in and out of power

Given the razor-thin margins of victory (less than 500 in 10 seats) one thing is certain: the ruling BJP would almost certainly have romped home, anti-incumbency notwithstanding, had it dropped at least 80-85 of its sitting MLAs against the 43 it actually did

Chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan says it is not for nothing that the women of Madhya Pradesh view him as beta, bhai or mama. The party manifesto, unveiled in the presence of Union finance minister Arun Jaitley, enumerates BJP's 'pro-farmer' policy and promises more to the agricultural class.

The Bagelkhand-Vindhya terrain encompassing Rewa, Satna, Seedhi, Shahdol, and Singrauli is a melting pot of castes. Here too the BJP holds the lion's share of the 34 seats, but refusal to rid itself of incompetent MLAs pitted in multi-cornered contests may endanger the party's seat retention prospects

Quite apart from the outside chance of the ruling BJP being ejected from power by the Congress after 15 years, two energetic formations threaten to disturb if not disrupt the well-entrenched binary narrative of past decades, at least on paper: groups with sharply focused agendas compared to the usual dalit, kisan, development mix brought to the plate by mainstream parties

The fortnight-long yatra was a spin-off from a lapsed BJP project to develop the pathway which Ram took en route Lanka as a tourist circuit