Shivraj’s second coming: Riding on his legacy in home turf, ‘Mama’ invokes ‘family reunion’, eyes Delhi shift

Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s apparent exhaustion from undertaking a 16-hour daily poll campaign dissipates as a group of young children run towards his convoy of bullet proof vehicles.

As the crowd swells, the security arrangement is thrown into disarray. But this doesn’t deter the former Madhya Pradesh chief minister, who rolls down his vehicle’s window pane and greets children, while his wife Sadhna looks on.

Shivraj, 65, is campaigning in a part of the Dewas belt which falls under the Vidisha Lok Sabha constituency, his home turf, where he has returned to contest the Lok Sabha polls after 20 years.

A four-time MP from Vidisha, Shivraj went on to become the longest-serving Madhya Pradesh CM involving four terms from 2005 until December 2023. The constituency near Bhopal has always been a BJP stronghold represented by even ex-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1991) and Sushma Swaraj (2009 and 2014). The Congress had managed to win it only twice (1980 and 1984) since 1967.

On what this election means for him, Shivraj tells The Indian Express: “This is my family. I am not a politician. We fight and live together like a family. There is no neta, security, nothing. There are only nephews and nieces, brother and sisters. There is only love.”

As the then CM, Shivraj had led the BJP to another resounding victory in the November 2023 Assembly elections. However, springing a surprise, the BJP leadership replaced him with low-profile Ujjain MLA Mohan Yadav as the CM. Afterwards, when asked whether he would switch to national politics, Shivraj said he would “rather die than ask something for himself”.

Months after the change of guard, Shivraj’s political future hung in the balance until the BJP decided to field him in the Lok Sabha