An Express Series — Part 3: MP | Fierce heat, thanda campaign: Restless young talk of change but few pin hope on Congress

At a public meeting April 25, on the day Congress candidate Mahesh Parmar filed his nomination form in Ujjain, his party’s senior Rajya Sabha MP Vivek Tankha said: “We will get 10-12 seats in MP.” In the same breath, he pared down his party’s ambition: “If we get even five…”

Other Congress leaders who addressed the smallish crowd that had turned out in the blazing heat, including Madhya Pradesh Congress chief Jitu Patwari and visiting Rajasthan leader Sachin Pilot, spoke of what the BJP has done wrong and why it is a threat — “we need to protect sanvidhan, lok tantra, aarakshan (constitution, democracy and reservation)”. But the number of times that leaders on the Congress stage said “desh/janata ne Modi par bharosa/vishwas kiya (the people trusted Modi)”, before talking of how Narendra Modi allegedly betrayed that trust, sounded like an unintended homage to the extent of the Modi-BJP’s dominance — and an acknowledgement of the Congress’s own uphill task in MP.

In MP, the BJP came back to power in the Assembly election held a few months ago, and though the Congress vote share came down only marginally, from 40.89 per cent in 2018 to 40.45 per cent in 2023, the BJP made a large gain of 7.6 per cent. The difference between the two parties in the Lok Sabha arena of 2019 — the distance the Congress needs to cover this time — is a stunning 23.5 per cent.

Unlike in neighbouring Gujarat, however, where Congress is widely seen to have lost its fighting spirit, Congress is still in a position, at least in some constituencies, to reap popular discontents in MP. Apart from the Muslim mohallas, it is a visible presence in its tribal pockets and Dalit bastis — both the SC and ST populations are sizeable in MP, at 16 per cent and 21 per