Personal phone calls from CM, nukkad sabhas, booth planning: How BJP won Chhindwara

The BJP bettered its sweep of Madhya Pradesh in 2019 by picking up the sole seat it had lost in 2019, the bastion of former chief minister and veteran Congress leader Kamal Nath. His son Nakul Nath lost from Chhindwara to the BJP’s Bunty Vivek Sahu by a margin of over 1 lakh votes.

After holding a meeting with state Congress president Jitu Patwari, Nath stated that he accepted the “decision of the people”.

Sahu ran the election on the plank of ‘Chhindwara ka Beta’ vs ‘Kamal Nath ka Beta’.

Nath had won nine times from Chhindwara — his family turf — between 1980 and 2019, when Nakul won the seat. The BJP had won 28 of the Lok Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh, losing Chhindwara by 37,536 votes.

On the face of it, the last-minute resignation of the three-time tribal MLA from Amarwara, Kamlesh Shah, and the subsequent dent in the tribal votes, was a major factor behind the loss of Nakul.

However, beneath the surface was a BJP machinery that kept humming even after its landslide victory in the recent Assembly elections when the party ended up with 163 seats in the state. This included effective booth management, feedback teams, nukkad sabhas, personal phone calls from Chief Minister Mohan Yadav, and disseminating the party’s message with the help of women callers helped turn the tide in BJP’s favor.

Reacting to the win, BJP state secretary and state in-charge booth management Rajneesh Agrawal told The Indian Express, “We won Chhindwara because we have been working hard there for decades. Finally our day has come. We won the seat through effective booth management and by setting up supervisory and feedback teams. Also, the central leadership personally intervened and took stock of the monthly targets.”

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