After shock Assembly defeat, Bhupesh Baghel faces daunting BJP fortress for LS

Named in the Congress’s first list of candidates for the Lok Sabha polls, its former Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel, who was expected to re-deliver Chhattisgarh to the party in last year’s Assembly polls but failed, is now staring at an uphill task. The party has fielded Baghel from the Rajnandgaon Lok Sabha seat, a BJP bastion for more than three decades, and seen as the turf of its former three-time CM Raman Singh.

In fact, the BJP, which returned to power in the Assembly polls, has lost Rajnandgaon only once since the state was formed in 2000. That was back in a 2007 bypoll, when the Congress’s Devwrat Singh defeated the BJP’s Pradeep Gandhi.

Before Chhattisgarh was carved out of Madhya Pradesh as well, Rajnandgaon had been won by the BJP in the previous three polls – 1989, 1996 and 1999, when Raman Singh defeated Congress heavyweight and former Madhya Pradesh CM Motilal Vora. The BJP has only widened the gap between it and the Congress in Rajnandgaon in recent polls.

From the BJP side, its sitting MP Santosh Pandey, who got 50.7% of the votes last time, will be contesting from Rajnandgaon.

With the Congress and BJP the two dominant parties in Chhattisgarh, the Lok Sabha polls in the state – much like the Assembly elections – are direct contests between the two. In Rajnandgaon, several other parties and Independents have tried their luck, but the best has been a mere 1% of the vote share by a third party, that being the BSP.

The last time Rajnandgaon saw a relatively close Lok Sabha contest was in 2004, the year the UPA I government was formed at the Centre. Even then, the BJP won the seat by a comfortable margin. In 2019, the Lok Sabha elections that followed the Congress’s comprehensive Assembly poll victory in