Ghosts of 2019 in Guna as Jyotiraditya Scindia faces another Yadav, another turncoat

IT WILL be turncoat vs turncoat in Madhya Pradesh’s Guna Lok Sabha seat, with the Congress pitting former BJP leader Rao Yadvendra Singh Yadav against its one-time stalwart Jyotiraditya Scindia.

Besides the symbolism, another reason for the Congress’s choice is the significant Yadav presence, estimated to be over 4 lakh, in Guna.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Scindia, then a Congress candidate, had lost to K P Yadav, a former loyalist turned BJP leader. Scindia’s embarrassing defeat from his own turf by 1.25 lakh votes set in motion a series of events, including an internal party struggle, eventually resulting in Scindia’s exit from the party in 2020. He took along 22 MLAs, causing the collapse of the Congress government led by Kamal Nath that had come to power in 2018. The BJP brought Scindia into Parliament via the Rajya Sabha and made him a Union minister.

Yadvendra Yadav used to be the BJP’s Ashok Nagar district panchayat president before he moved to the Congress prior to the 2023 Assembly elections. He subsequently contested the elections from the Mungaoli Assembly seat, losing by a narrow margin of 5,422 votes to the BJP’s Brijendra Singh Yadav.

Not all Congress leaders are happy with the party fielding Yadvendra Yadav from Guna. A senior local leader who was vying for the Guna ticket said: “How can you trust a person whose entire family is in the BJP (including his mother, brother and other members)? Did they not think of the Congress leaders who have been fighting the BJP for 15 years?”

Dismissing the logic of the Yadav vote, the leader told The Indian Express: “There is a Yadav CM now (the BJP’s Mohan Yadav). Will they (the Yadav community) be swayed by a CM or a small-time panchayat leader? We could have fielded