Politics of sameness in Madhya Pradesh
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, August 17: Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is once more amplifying his poll themes that “farmers paid 18 per cent of interests in the Congress times”, “there were no roads, but potholes in the state during Kamal Nath-led governments”, “there were no electricity, and the state would plunge into darkness after evening”, and so on. These charges of Chouhan are not new. They were heard in 2018. They were also spoken in the 2013 Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh.
Kamal Nath also has similar charges against the incumbent BJP-led government that “unemployment is at record high”, “price rise is hurting the people”, “the poor are suffering”, and so on. These charges have also been repeated elections and elections.
Politics in Madhya Pradesh is all about sameness. Faces are also same. Chouhan and Nath now breeds boredom. Even their respective parties admit that the lack of newness in the faces are risks for them. The BJP has sought to peddle speculation by fielding Union Minister Narendra Singh Tomar by making him the campaign committee chief of the party.
The BJP also is pampering the import from the Congress, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Union Minister for Civil Aviation. Scindia has the energy of a neo-convert. He is spending more time in Madhya Pradesh than New Delhi. He is specially taking care to shed the image of Maharaja by taking meals at the party workers’ homes.
The Congress so far has not been able to create similar space for speculation and Nath is the face of the party for all practical purposes. The other Congress face in the state is Digvijaya Singh. He has ruled himself out of the contention by endearing to the space of a right-basher with his utterances of “Osama ji” and his contrarian loud-thinking on Mumbai terror attack and Batla House encounter. The Diggi Raja is also out of the contention, because Madhya Pradesh is the laboratory for the Congress to practice soft-Hindutuva. Rahul Gandhi, former Congress president, sports ‘janeu (sacred thread)’ in Madhya Pradesh. His sister and Congress general secretary (national) Priyanka Gandhi Vadra takes part in Aarti in the presence of shutter-boxes. Thus, the Congress sticks to the soft-Hindutva script to blunt any scope for the BJP to whip polarization and play the Hindutva card.
Thus, the politics of sameness persists and the people in the state has to choose between Chouhan and Nath. The risk of sameness is truly real. The voters may feel lethargic. The party workers may also invite inertia. There could be demands for novelty. Indore is closer to Mumbai. Politicians in Indore have close ties with actors and performers in the Hindi film world. The boredom caused by the sameness of politics will somehow be countered by the singers and actors playing cameo roles in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections.
The outcome of the Karnataka Assembly election has shown that the people are not really jumping to the spree of inauguration and laying of foundation of infrastructure projects. That is done by the ruling party, again as part of the sameness of politics. The people are now too familiar with the sameness of the inauguration and laying of foundation spree by the leaders of the ruling party. Prime Minister Narendra Modi began travelling to Karnataka five months ahead of the state Assembly election, and inaugurated all that he could lay his hands on. The risk of social media flooded with waterlogged Bengaluru-Mysuru Expressway because of the project not seen through full-proof commissioning was also ignored.
Similarly, Modi has begun travelling to Madhya Pradesh. Elections will be held in November. The Congress campaign has also been kicked off by Vadra. The sameness, ironically, is also in the poll narratives of the two main contenders in the state. The Congress is seeking a repeat success of the party’s guarantee-led poll promises, which are essentially to give cash in hands to the people. The incumbent CM in Madhya Pradesh is also on the same boat, as he made exceptions to Modi’s calls to the BJP-ruled states to shun the politics of Revdi (freebies). Chouhan-led government is also giving cash in hands to the people through several schemes.
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