In crucial Gwalior-Chambal’s prestige battle, it is anger against BJP and lack of trust for Congress

People of Gwalior-Chambal region of Madhya Pradesh are uncertain of their choice in 2023 Assembly polls, with both BJP and Congress vying for their votes. While some are dissatisfied with BJP, they are wary of Congress’s promises. People cite issues of jobs, electricity, water and stray cattle. Despite BJP's welfare schemes, Congress's voter is silent but may come out on polling day.

Kalyan Singh Tomar’s two sons aged 10 and 6 go to a private school in Dimani town about 3-4 km from their Kachnodha village. While he is okay working hard to pay the annual fee of more than ₹30,000 for each of his children, what aches him is that there is a government school right in front of his house and three generations of his family donated pieces of land for the school’s construction and its expansion.

Dimani is an Assembly constituency in the Morena district of Madhya Pradesh’s politically significant Gwalior-Chambal region that sends 34 legislators to the State’s 230 MLA-strong Assembly. In the 2018 Assembly polls, the Congress had won 26 seats while the BJP could only manage seven, down from its tally of 20 in 2013 polls.

The Congress’s gains in the region went in vain in March 2020 when 22 MLAs from across the State resigned from the party following Jyotiraditya Scindia, now a Union Minister, and joined the BJP. At least 16 of them were from the Gwalior-Chambal region.

Mr. Scindia, fondly addressed as ‘Maharaj’, is the scion of the erstwhile royal family of Gwalior which ruled most parts of the region.

The move had brought down the 15-month Kamal Nath government and ensured a return of a BJP government with Shivraj Singh Chouhan as the Chief Minister. The State went to bypolls in November 2020 for 28 seats. The BJP won nine out of 16 seats that went to bypolls from the region, taking its tally to 16 and regaining its lost ground with Mr. Scindia’s popularity.

This time around, both the parties have been campaigning aggressively in the region, part of which also has significant presence of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) due to its proximity with Uttar Pradesh and caste equations in the Chambal belt.

However, the voters from the region who had decisively sided with the Congress in 2018 appear in two minds in 2023. While they have visible dissatisfaction with the BJP, several welfare schemes of Mr. Chouhan’s government give a breather to the party.